


Dearer Than Space And Liberty

by boxparade



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe, Developing Relationship, Kid Fic, M/M, Military, Minor Character Death, Orphans, Unconventional Families, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-04-06
Updated: 2014-06-21
Packaged: 2017-11-03 03:30:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 37,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/376623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boxparade/pseuds/boxparade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The marriage of Jeannie Elizabeth Miller and David James Sheppard was quite possibly, at least among Canadians with a television and Americans with ties to Wall Street, the biggest event since the invention of the wheel.</p><p>But this isn't a story about them; not really.</p><p>No, this is a story about their brothers—John Sheppard and Rodney McKay—and the one event that drew them into each other's orbits, unwillingly or not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Marriage of the Century

**Author's Note:**

> ~~~UPDATES~~~
> 
> 07.31.13:: I've written 6,000 words for this in the last 2-3 days. I also wrote 1500 words planning out the rest of the fic (in a direction I like much more than the old one). If this keeps up, I don't think this fic will be on hiatus any longer. (We'll see.) Hopefully August will prove lucrative and I get a lot of writing done. I'm actually really excited about this.
> 
> 07.23.13:: this work is *tentatively* on hiatus. Except for that part where I started watching SGA (for the first time, if you'd believe it) and I suddenly find myself writing this again. I don't want to get anyone's hopes up, since this was abandoned until literally this past week, but I have a week with no internet connection coming up in August, and I'm writing it again which...yeah. Surprise! But a few people have expressed interest in this story so I'm hoping to build up some momentum, given all the new ideas I've got for this, and finish sometime this century.
> 
> Also: some minor details may be changing in earlier parts of the story to fit my new ideas, so if you don't remember something being that way the first time around, it's because it probably wasn't. Nothing that should negatively impact your reading experience.
> 
> :::
> 
> I'll try to keep this updated with progress. If I do abandon it permanently, I'll change the tags to reflect this, and inform everyone, I promise.
> 
> Thanks for the support so far.
> 
> \- Jessa

The marriage of Jeannie Elizabeth Miller and David James Sheppard was quite possibly, at least among Canadians with a television and Americans with ties to Wall Street, the biggest event since the invention of the wheel. It was a well-known fact that Sheppard Inc. was one of the most up-and-coming industries to hit the market since Apple, and everyone that had stock in the company—or stock in any company, really, with the way Sheppard Inc. dominated the stock market—had been watching David Sheppard for years with bated breath.

He was set to inherit the company when the CEO, Patrick Sheppard, retired in two years, and Americans had been talking about what that would mean for the industry, with the way David was always throwing around plans for expansion and progress. They expected big things for David and Sheppard Inc., and they expected the company’s new leadership to revolutionize all of modern technology.

Which was why, when it finally hit the papers that David Sheppard had been spotted with none other than Jeannie Miller, the Jeannie Miller, the ‘Princess of Canada’, the majority of the continent of North America gasped and the rumors started flying.

Jeannie Miller was the daughter of the Prime Minister of Canada, and she was also something of a celebrity in the way that she was a household name in all English-speaking countries. She’d grown up in the political system, following around her mother from the time she could walk, all the way to the Prime Minister’s office and a fair amount of fame. She was a well-known political activist, using her name and her mother’s position to throw Canada’s support behind a lot of organizations, and most of Canada was calling her “The Next Prime Minister” in capital letters, like it was a fact.

She usually just laughed, waved a hand around in the air and said “Come now, I’m a bit too young for that. I can follow the next one.” Which, really, just confirmed most of Canada’s ideas that Jeannie would eventually take office like her mother and lead their country to the promised land, or something equally ridiculous. She was a modern day Princess Diana with all the prospects and support of John F. Kennedy.

When the tabloids started raging about the “secret love affair” it was really no surprise that most of the physics department at Berkeley started watching Entertainment Tonight a lot more closely than usual. It wasn’t even an “affair” or “secret” at all; they’d been purposely caught on a couple of dates in the past few weeks, and it wasn’t as if either of them had had any current relationship. They were just dating.

So when E! announced that they’d been caught holding hands, god forbid, and making googley-eyes at each other at some high-end restaurant in New York, the entire department, along with most of the university, started placing bets on how things would go down: a couple more weeks and then not a word, a few months before they went out with a bang, a passionate love affair lasting, on-and-off, through the years until they were torn apart by forces of divine will.

The like.

Johansen, the gossipy little intern that hadn’t yet learned to fear her boss, was the unofficial bookie and couldn’t resist trying to get her tiny little hands—much too slow to actually make any progress in this field—on some more money.

“Doctor McKay,” she chirped, bounding up on bouncy strides to Rodney, who was quite obviously busy actually making meaningful contributions to the world and did not care, in the slightest, about a couple of pop stars and their stupid, obvious love life. “Got any bets on the Miller-Sheppard scandal?”

Rodney snorted and took a red dry-erase marker to violently slash through an equation that was wrong, so wrong, and how was it every single person that he worked with was so impossibly stupid?

“Doctor McKay?” She prodded gently, and if Rodney were a kinder man, he would’ve patted her shoulder and quietly explained why she was a failure as a scientist and a human being, but as it was, he really couldn’t care less for her mental well-being, so he snapped at her instead.

“What? What? Do I look like the type of person that cares about celebrity gossip? I don’t have the time to speculate about sleazy businessmen and manipulative politicians and their pointless love lives! As you can see, I’m quite busy trying to revolutionize modern science, because last I checked, this was a learning institution, but oh! Oh! No, of course not, my mistake, this isn’t the physics department, it’s the pop culture club! Let me go find some punch and little hats and we can have a damn party and leave real work behind! NO. Were you raised by chimpanzees? You’re useless, useless, why are you even in this lab?”

Rodney heard the door slam without having noticed the figure beside him leaving, and he would’ve grinned in quiet satisfaction at finally breaking the newest intern, except some other idiot had written yet another equation that had too much wrong with it to even be salvaged, and Rodney was busy erasing the entire board and writing something more useful there, like stick figures. Or scribbles.

From that moment onward, most of the department learned to keep the gossip to a minimum, and Rodney had noticed a lot more televisions blinking out the moment he walked into a room. The intern hadn’t been around lately, and he was getting a lot of glares from some of the younger recruits, but he had work to do and they could take their ridiculous hang-ups elsewhere, he didn’t have time to deal with their work ethic dropping and he could swear they were screwing up their paperwork just to spite him.

One day, people would finally recognize his genius, build a shrine, and spend all their time there worshipping him so he could get some goddamn work done without a ton of imbeciles bombarding him with pointless questions and mangling their math so much it took him hours just to work out what they were trying to do.

Until then, he had a call to make and some bitching to do.

The phone rang six times before someone finally picked up. Rodney didn’t wait for a “hello”.

“Your love life is destroying my lab, I can’t get anything done because all my charges are useless, brainless idiots, and if I didn’t already know it were impossible, I’d be accusing you of sending psychic vibes through all the entertainment shows to scramble their brains until they think this gibberish they’re giving me is science.”

“Why, hello Mer, nice to hear from you, too,” Jeannie drawled, and Rodney huffed indignantly down the phone line.

“What are you going to do about this?” He asked quickly, without time for pretense, not with the massive stack of mail sitting on his coffee table that he had yet to sort through. There was bound to be more than one utility bill in there.

“I don’t really see how it’s my problem,” Jeannie snarked, and Rodney scowled at the way he knew her eyebrow was drawn up, deliberately playing dumb and slowing things down for him more than her sibling-power warranted her.

“Because!” Rodney sniped, “You and your boyfriend could potentially set back scientific advances by decades! If I weren’t here to fix everything for everyone else, we’d still be throwing rocks at paintings of buffalo on cave walls for luck with the hunt!”

Rodney heard the sigh and knew it was paired with an eye roll, and eventually Jeannie was going to have to start listening to his rants more. He was sure of it. “He’s not my boyfriend,” Jeannie said with another sigh and a shuffle that sounded suspiciously like book pages turning. “At least, not officially. We’re announcing it next week, so could you maybe calm down until then? The sky isn’t going to fall just because you’re a little behind.”

Rodney snorted and said “Of course not, that’s impossible. The atmosphere isn’t capable of falling, in the sense that you’re implying. But that doesn’t mean this isn’t severely detrimental to my work! Some of us are too busy working towards Nobels—that’s _Nobels_ , plural, thank you—to go galavanting around with ignorant business tycoons and—”

“Galavanting?” Jeannie interrupted, a hint of a smirk in her voice, but before Rodney could come up with a proper response she said “Look, I’m sure things will calm down eventually. I have to go, I’ve got a meeting early tomorrow morning and it’s late. I’m sure in the depths of your soul, you’re secretly very happy for David and I, and wish us the best.” The last part was said without a trace of sarcasm, and Rodney was about to launch into a tirade of how utterly impossible it would be for him to have any inkling of respect for a man with a minor in English that was masochistic enough to date his sister, but Jeannie just giggled lightly and hung up.

Rodney snapped the phone shut and purposefully let it slip down in between the cushions on the sofa because anyone else that had to call him was just going to whine about how hard it all was, and how they couldn’t do anything because they were useless. The ever-growing pile of unopened mail was staring at him and threatening to spill over, so with a sigh he picked up the first and debated whether or not it was worthy of his time or better off being fed through the paper shredder.

He also made a note to google David Sheppard and judge just how many vague threats he had to send out, listing all the ways in which he would die if he turned Rodney’s sister into a useless housewife and stripped her of all her potential. So long as he made a couple of grammatical errors and avoided talking about anything particularly academic, Jeannie would never know.

 

* * *

 

John didn’t talk to David much, because he didn’t talk to Patrick. His father already had the perfect son to take over the business, give him grandchildren, let him settle comfortably into retirement without worry of what might become of his business if left in the hands of someone else. As such, he didn’t particularly need John, and he’d made that abundantly clear throughout the years.

It hadn’t taken long for John to figure out. He was nine when his mother got sick, and John was the first at her side whenever she needed anything. Patrick had drawn back, become tight-lipped and desperately sending people around the country to find doctors to help her. David had been his right-hand man, always eager to answer Patrick’s phone calls when he was busy on another line, or manage the staff when his father was busy with doctors. They’d formed a team completely dedicated to extending Mom’s life, working it just like the company, everything carefully planned and as efficient as possible.

John just wanted to spend time with his mother before she was gone.

On some level, John’s fairly sure Patrick resented him for that. John had been there when they weren’t, had spent mornings in bed, listening to Mozart hum through the tinny speakers, smiling as they bit into fresh strawberries. His mother had read with him, late into the night when neither of them could sleep, and John would sneak into the kitchen and come back upstairs with mugs of hot chocolate. She never said a word about the extra sugar late at night.

When the illness finally caught up with her, John was the first one there, holding her hand and crying because the doctor was telling them it was just her time, there was nothing he could do. His father had been meeting with someone else, had only gotten back a few minutes before she passed, dragging David behind him.

She was too far gone to really notice the way Patrick stormed in, tearing apart with the pressure, and practically thrown John from her bed, replacing him in seconds, all the while yelling at the doctor about how he should do something, fix it, they just needed more time.

Looking back, John could almost understand his father’s behavior, his desperation to not end up alone, in the end, with nothing but his company to shield him. But as a nine year old boy about to lose his mother, getting thrown to the ground by the father John had been sure didn’t love Mom, not when he spent so much time away from her, it had been the breaking point.

John had spent the rest of his life running like a bat out of hell from his father and anything that had to do with him. Joined the air force after they’d fought about the war and its effect on the economy, been shipped off overseas the same day Patrick was announcing Sheppard Inc.’s successor to be David, not the both of them as he’d originally planned. He’d stopped calling at all when his father made some comment about his ‘one and only son’ to the interviewers when David took up a higher position in the company, and somewhere along the line, talking to David was just too strong of a reminder of his father and everything he’d been running from, for years.

He’d been in Antarctica by the time the wedding invitations were sent out, surprised that he’d even gotten one at all. He conveniently scheduled a routine but necessary flight for that day, putting himself down as the pilot, and flat-out refused to think about it any more than that.

It was for the best, after all.

 

* * *

 

Trying to explain to his colleagues why he had to take a weekend off and book tickets to Canada was like trying to explain what an elephant was without being able to say the word “elephant”. He hedged around it a lot, attempting to mumble things about family obligations and mandatory vacation time, but they all knew him well enough to know how often he took time off, which was never.

They’d finally worked it out a week before the wedding, laughing gleefully and pointing at him, exclaiming that he must be going to the ‘royal wedding’, as people had affectionately nicknamed it, and that they always knew he was a secret fan of the ever-famous, lovely Jeannie Miller.

He’d rolled his eyes, insulted their intelligence again, and shooed them off without another word, and when his flight touched down in Toronto and Jeannie’s driver met him at the airport, he’d bitched to anyone that would listen about anything that came to mind.

That didn’t do anything to halt the massive wedding that he was honor-bound to attend. (Honor-bound was how Jeannie had put it, Rodney thought of it more as blackmail.)

“Do they even understand what the word ‘fragile’ means?” Rodney ranted as he dragged two overstuffed black bags through his sister’s doorway, “Who hired these people? Can I fire them? Please, god, tell me I have that power, as a McKay, and don’t even try to feed me that line about you taking Mom’s name, you know what it says on your birth certificate. I’m sure I could hack the records if you need reminding.”

“Mer!” Jeannie exclaimed, whirling around a corner and immediately enclosing him in a hug, saying “It’s so good to see you.”

“Oh god, you’re pregnant!” Rodney proclaimed as Jeannie pulled back, reading the bright smile on her face that was quickly fading into something more speculative. “Please tell me you didn’t let that —that—that corporate monkey knock you up with a bunch of little corporate monkey babies and—”

“Mer, calm down, David didn’t do anything. What makes you think I’m pregnant?” She quirked a sharp eyebrow at him and crossed her arms, unfazed by Rodney’s flailing arms and look of abject horror.

“You’re all—” Rodney gestured to her grandly, blue eyes flashing in the light briefly, “smiley!” Jeannie blinked a couple of times at his word choice, but he continued, oblivious, “You’re happy to see me! You’re not complaining about the fact that I want to fire every one of your staff. You didn’t smack me for calling your boyfriend a monkey, which he very well is, but this—” and more dramatic hand gestures accompanied his words, “This is not you. I am forced to conclude that you’re pregnant and the pregnancy hormones are distorting your mind into thinking you actually like me, and—”

“Aw, Mer, I do like you,” Jeannie cut in, sarcasm dripping from her every word, and Rodney stopped because that sounded much more like the sister he knew. She waited until he narrowed his eyes, recalculating her situation and attitude, before she drawled listlessly, “Did you ever think that maybe there’s another reason I’m exceptionally happy?”

Rodney didn’t hesitate before stating “What other possible explanation could there be?”

“I’m getting married!” Jeannie shouted, a little of her glee returned with the way her eyes lit up at the thought, and she laughed at the way Rodney startled and nearly dropped his bag, the one containing his university-issue, high-powered, specially designed laptop that probably cost more than Jeannie’s entire estate, and he was definitely going to think of brilliant ways to get her back for this, dragging him out here for some ridiculous event that hardly held any real meaning…

“And this…pleases you?” Rodney questioned carefully, watching his sister for any slight differences that might indicate she’d been replaced by an alien drone or something similar.

Jeannie rolled her eyes, then flicked a hand to tell the staff to bring Rodney’s things—at least, the things he could bear to part with for a moment—to the guest room. “Of course it does,” Jeannie replied simply, still smiling like she knew something secret, and Rodney had known that look from their childhood, and it meant—well, it never went well for Rodney.

He slanted his eyes and gave her one more appraising glance, taking in the white tank-top and slim sweat pants with the way her hair was tied back, indicating she’d been working out, and asked, just to clarify, “So you’re not pregnant?”

She smirked triumphantly, and Rodney knew before she said the words, knew he’d asked exactly what she’d been hoping he would, and she darted in to kiss his cheek in a complete lapse of character, chirping “Doesn’t mean we aren’t trying!” before fleeing the scene on agile feet, leaving Rodney sputtering and fretting in the front hall, his laptop bag feeling inexplicably heavy on his shoulder as he called out after her “I’m going to kill him! That arrogant, money-loving prick, I’m going to bury him where they’ll never find the body before he can knock you up! Do you know what happens to a body when you shove it into a vacuum chamber? I DO. Jeannie! Get back here so I can yell at you properly and plan to kill your boyfriend, don’t make me start counting! One. One. Two. Three. Five. Eight. I swear, if you… Thirteen!”

 

* * *

 

The first time John heard about the kid, he was handling a supply drop and really didn’t need his copilot rambling on about all the shit that had happened back home since the last time he’d gotten a care package. Bookman was young, fresh from the academy, and John wondered what it was about him that got him stationed here, in the middle of nowhere. He was still getting care packages from his mother.

He’d been rambling, anyway, and John was mostly tuning it out because he had to keep the chopper as steady as possible while the ground team worked out how to rig the supplies without damaging something. But then there was something about some magazine, and this entire scandal regarding the Sheppard-Miller marriage, and something about the fact that Miller had been pregnant two months before the wedding, and then John jerked the controls and twisted around to look at his copilot, who was wide-eyed and a little freaked at the way the chopper had just jerked upwards, and John had to remember how to breathe again before he could remain steady so the ground team would stop yelling.

He grit his teeth, hissed at the guy “You need to shut up now,” and completely ignored his pale, wet-behind-the-ears copilot until they were safely back on the ground.

The moment they hit the base, he had the guy’s arm clenched between his fingers and was demanding to see whatever magazine or tabloid mentioned the child, and after a few sounds that sounded suspiciously like whimpers, John was staring down at some telephoto picture of his brother, his sister-in-law, and a significant bump in his sister-in-laws abdomen that was, apparently, his niece or nephew.

He didn’t speak, move, or breathe for the next five minutes, even after Bookman started asking if he was alright, and what the problem was, and whether or not he was a fan of Jeannie Miller, like so many people were.

“Christ,” John exclaimed, dragging a hand through his hair as he blew out a breath, still looking at the tiny little blob under the pink shirt that he didn’t even know about, and something fierce and painful was tearing its way through his veins.

Four months later, when the chopper was hurtling itself toward the ground and he was wondering when his life was supposed to start flashing before his eyes, he had a moment to think that, if he ever made it out of here alive and got back to the states, he was going to patch things up with David, no matter what Patrick had to say on the matter.

He wanted to know the kid.


	2. Homecoming

“Hell,” Rodney breathed, his eyes widening as he eyed the curve of his sister’s stomach, trying to judge just how pregnant she was simply by the shape. “You’re actually having a child?”

Jeannie laughed, that bell-like sound that she could only manage when she was in one of her happier moods, and replied calmly “Yeah. That’s kinda what you do after you get married, Mer.”

Rodney was still gaping when David walked in with Amelia, some neighbor’s kid that they were looking after, hanging upside-down by her ankles and giggling madly, her dress flying up all around her as she tried to push it away from her face, shrieking “Stoppit! Stoppit!” Rodney was halfway out of his seat and glaring daggers at David, despite having met him only a few times, once at the wedding and a few times since.

He seemed confused about Rodney’s reaction, but the bastard wouldn’t put down Amelia, so Rodney’s hands were tied. “If you weren’t holding a kid right now,” Rodney growled, but Jeannie was stifling a giggle behind him and it was probably lessening the intimidation factor, “I’d be pushing you off the nearest roof.”

“What?” David asked blankly, “What did I do?”

Rodney narrowed his eyes, suspected that Jeannie had already told David this was going to happen, and now he was just playing it up. “You knocked my sister up! Look at her stomach. Do not think, for a second, that I’m going to let you get away with this.” He pointed an accusing finger at David, startling a laugh out of the man, and that only made Rodney want to wring his neck that much more.

“Relax, Mer. It was my idea.”

Rodney whirled around to eye his sister, the way her complexion was glowing and serene, and then promptly remembered exactly how much screaming had been going on in those videos they’d shown in high school, and didn’t believe for a moment that this wasn’t a grievous crime committed by his brother-in-law, because who would want to do something like that?

“I refuse to believe such a ridiculous notion. I’m sure he’s drugged you, there is no possible way any woman on earth would want to destroy their body and spend weeks losing brain cells do to lack of sleep and general sanity, this is obviously his fault, and if you won’t allow me to call up Colonel Carter and have her shoot him, then I’m going to ask what he thinks he can do to make this up to you.” At that, Rodney turned back around and shot David a glare, his lips pressing into a thin line as he said “Well?”

David seemed a little shell-shocked by that, and Rodney smirked at the way he was paling and his eyes were darting around, looking for answers, but Jeannie’s voice chimed in again with “It’s a girl.”

Rodney twirled around, and he really needed to stop doing that, he was getting dizzy and he was never going to get any work done here if his vestibular system wasn’t completely intact, never mind what all these frequent flights to visit his sister were doing to it.

“A girl?” Rodney murmured, and at Jeannie’s answering smile, all thoughts of David’s body floating out in space, suffocating as the water on his tongue began to boil, left his mind for the fact that in three short months, he was going to have a niece. In moments, he was at Jeannie’s side with a careful hand placed over her stomach, smiling as he waited for some sign of movement, talking in a low voice completely uncharacteristic for him about what names they were planning.

He would never admit it aloud, but Rodney McKay may have liked his unborn niece. Just a bit. A tiny, little, minuscule, great-big lot.

 

* * *

 

By the time John had regained consciousness long enough to hold a conversation, he knew exactly three things: He was getting sent back to the States the moment the weather let up, the Air Force was gently shoving him out the door because they needed a scapegoat to explain this one while he had been unconscious and unable to fight it, and he was completely, undoubtedly screwed.

It was some sort of miracle he’d made it out of that crash alive, much less without any serious enough injuries to warrant a permanent medical discharge, though a fat lot of good that would do him with the way they’d placed all the blame for this on him. Never mind the weather conditions or the fact that his radio had given out before he could get orders, but crash a helicopter with some big-important Chinese guy in it, and suddenly he was to blame for the tension between the two countries that people were exaggerating with words like ‘impending war’.

He couldn’t say he was going to miss the military, not with the way they’d kicked him around for years, shipping him off to a frozen wasteland like it was a promotion, but he’d miss the flying. Someone—John was still a little fuzzy around the edges, and had never quite distinguished between all the people that had talked to him while he was laid up—had mentioned that they’d probably get him out on an honorable discharge, or at least a general one, and then he’d be able to find work flying somewhere else.

It almost made him feel better, but then awhile after that, his stomach decided it was time to empty out everything he’d managed to force down the last two days, and that was the end of any good mood he may have been in.

John had been in the States for three weeks by the time he actually got around to driving into town to pick up a couple tabloids, or maybe a television, so he could surreptitiously stalk his brother and decide whether or not he wanted to do this. 

He’d found something of a house—it was really more like a cabin, or some sort of small lodge—in the mountains of Colorado, a few hours outside Boulder. There was too much space for him, but it had a nice view and plenty of places to hike that reached a high enough altitude that it would almost be like flying. He might take up parasailing, if the physical therapy hurried the hell up and fixed his knee.

The problem with having something of a celebrity for a brother was that the public only cared when something interesting had happened recently. Whatever had passed in the month since his niece was born, it probably hadn’t been worthy enough for the tabloids or entertainment shows to pick up on, and he had to dig around for old copies of Star, pathetic as it was, just to find a snippet about him.

Another week, and his knee was feeling a lot better, probably due to the regular walking and lack of stress. He’d stumbled his way into the nearest electronics store, bought himself a laptop, hired someone to come hook up the wireless at the house, and after a couple hundred games of ‘Call Or Don’t Call?’ he’d booked plane tickets to New York and figured if David wasn’t still holding a grudge, he wouldn’t particularly care that John hadn’t called beforehand to let him know he was dropping by.

Unfortunately, he was wrong, because after fighting his way past the gate guard and a couple of distrustful staff members along the path to the house, and after ringing the doorbell at least twice, he got three seconds to glimpse at David’s face before the door slammed back closed.

John sighed, raised his fist to knock this time, because the doorbell was annoying as hell, and had managed to rap off three quick knocks before the door swung away from his fist and this time, instead of his brother, there was a frazzled-looking blonde woman standing in the doorway, blinking at him suspiciously.

“Um. Hi,” He started awkwardly, rubbing the back of his head in a gesture of uncertainty, trying to figure out why this woman looked vaguely familiar, and who she was, before he embarrassed himself even more.

“Who are you?” She snapped tiredly, but at least she was talking to him, which was a hell of a lot more than he’d gotten from his brother.

“John Sheppard,” He replied automatically, and his mouth was open to tack on ‘David’s brother’ in case this woman didn’t make the connection, but she stopped him before he could.

“Do you want money?” She asked, completely serious, staring at John with some sort of feline intensity, and John unconsciously took a step back.

“Uh. No?” He said, making it a question because he wasn’t entirely sure if she was offering to just give him money, or accusing him of begging, or something similar to that. She narrowed her eyes, still refusing to open the doors more than a fraction, and he tacked on “I just wanna talk to Dave.”

Another moment of scrutiny, and suddenly her entire demeanor shifted, and she was smiling warmly and opening the double doors wide for him to step in, gently chastising him about taking off his shoes and saying gently, “David should be in the study, pacing a hole in the floor. I’ll go ask the kitchen to make us something. Coffee, tea, or something a bit stronger?”

“Coffee’s fine,” he answered numbly, watching as the woman—Jeannie, his mind supplied—swayed off down the hall, flashes of sunlight from the windows and skylights catching her hair every other moment.

John toed his shoes off and chose a different hall to meander down, trying to figure out where the study might be located, because he’d never been to this estate before, and for all he knew, David could’ve developed a severe aversion to sunlight and put the study in the basement.

It wasn’t in the basement, but rather the third door on his right, after a hall closet and the library, and when the door whooshed open, David snapped around to stare at John with hard eyes.

He let himself in, closing the door behind him in case this was one of those times when they’d shout at each other until they were both too worn out to stay angry, and stared right back at him.

David turned away, facing out the window toward the expanse of pond and trees John had seen on his walk to the house, and he stopped any pangs of hatred for this kind of luxurious lifestyle before they could get him in any more trouble than he already was. David had chosen this life, John had chosen another.

“You weren’t at the wedding,” David said after an extended silence, his voice calm but his words clipped and short, like he was holding a lot more back than he was letting out.

“I was in Antarctica,” John replied honestly. He left out how he didn’t actually want to go anyway, because even if he had asked for leave, he doubted he would’ve gotten any, not with the Air Force’s attitude towards him.

David nodded solemnly, and it wasn’t exactly acceptance, but he seemed slightly less angry, so maybe it was more like understanding—understanding that while it wasn’t impossible, it was a bit too much work to warrant John’s time and effort.

“I haven’t heard from you in five years,” David said sharply, and John winced at the accusation, the hurt laced behind all the anger, because he understood it. He didn’t want to say that he hadn’t realized it’d been that long, because he had. He’d known, as each year passed, that the rift between them had just grown larger and wider, but he hadn’t made any attempts to stop it, or any attempts to bridge it.

“I learned about Madison from the tabloids,” John rebuffed, and watched the way David flinched, because they both understood that the silence went both ways. John may have started it, but David certainly hadn’t tried very hard to reopen communications.

The air cooled between them, and the tension and sharpness of their postures slowly dropped away, and John knew that was it. There wasn’t going to be any more barbs, or any screaming, at least not this time. It was something of a relief, because John didn’t know if he was in the state of mind to fight with Dave right now; he was a bit too skittish after getting kicked out of the force, he probably would’ve run away again.

But David turned back towards him, stared at him like he was trying to count the number of lines John had around the corners of his eyes, see the years piled up there. John knew his face didn’t give anything away, not the shakiness he’d been feeling since he’d gotten the plane ticket here, not the way he felt like his life had been thrown up into the air, and he still didn’t know where he could land.

David didn’t need to know any of these things, so John didn’t mention them.

“Dad doesn’t know you’re back,” David stated suddenly, and John’s voice cracked a little on the “No.”

He was expecting some sort of resistance, but David just nodded once, a recognition, and maybe some sort of understanding for the reason Patrick didn’t know about his homecoming. “You wanna meet Maddie?”

“Yeah,” John said, and his face cracked into the first real smile he’d shown since getting here, and David returned it tenfold like the years between them had never happened, or didn’t matter. John followed silently behind David, listening to his voice like a background hum, waxing lyrical about his daughter and the incredible things she could do, the cute little stories of parenthood that warmed John’s heart.

According to David, Jeannie had been incredible with the kid so far, like a superhero, and they were both running on low sleep because the baby needed something every two hours and his brother wouldn’t dare let any of the staff feed, hold, or change Madison. They meandered into what must’ve been the nursery, a small, periwinkle blue crib sitting by the window.

John’s heart stuttered in his chest, and he’d never been one for children, never figured he’d have any of his own, or that he’d have contact with any of David’s, but Madison was adorable, and she would have their mother’s dark hair, John was certain. She seemed to be sleeping, and John wasn’t about to disturb her, but just as he was about to pull back the hand he’d unconsciously extended towards her tiny form, her eyes blinked open.

She didn’t seem to need anything, which David was quietly musing about, because it seemed like every waking hour she had, she was screaming for something or other.

John touched her cheek, hardly at all really, and he was going to leave it at that when David suddenly surged forward, scooped her up, and started staring at John expectantly with a whole few pounds of baby in his arms. John blinked, was trying to figure out a way to tell Dave that it probably wasn’t the best idea for him to hold a kid, he had no idea—

But Dave just smirked, told him to form a cradle with his arms and keep a hand on the back of her head, and then John was holding this tiny little thing that weighed hardly anything at all that was alive and gorgeous and his niece.

“Jesus,” John breathed, staring down into two giant blue eyes, and he felt all the air leave his chest with force. He looked up at David, bewildered and a little giddy, hoping to startle a laugh out of his brother because this was just so much to take in, but David only had eyes for Madison.

Jeannie waltzed in after awhile, carrying a tray with three cups of coffee and a gesture at her breast for Madison, smiling when she saw John with the baby in his arms, struggling with his emotions more than was respectable for a grown adult.

John’s head snapped up when he heard her, and David promptly made proper introductions. John handed Madison back to Dave, figuring he probably shouldn’t try moving and holding a baby at the same time, and shook Jeannie’s hand before accepting his coffee. He could see the line of her jaw and the shape of her lips in Madison now that he had a moment to think, and David had really managed to get himself a looker.

She was brilliant, too. Down-to-earth and strikingly intelligent, without any of the usual sleaze that came with politicians, but John was fairly sure Canadian politicians were held to a different standard than American ones. She happily chatted about the summer, about Madison, about the ski trip David and her had gone on months ago before she’d been pregnant, about the wedding and the honeymoon without making John feel guilty for missing it at all.

She gracefully treaded around the topics of David’s company and their father, sticking instead to her own work and the way their family was split between two countries, spending weeks at a time at their townhouse in Toronto, switching to New York when David’s work took precedent, came here to this sprawling summer home, just bordering Canada, when they had down time and could work from home.

John was surprised how easily he melded into their little family, with Jeannie patching up all the unspoken things between David and him, never once losing track of her thoughts, and John left feeling strangely whole, like maybe he could have a family again; like maybe family wasn’t always about all the things they’d lost over the years and all John’s shortcomings.

Maybe, without Patrick to drive a wedge between them, he could have this. Forget the past and move forward, forge some type of life with his brother and his sister-in-law and his niece, in time.


	3. Two Brothers

To Jeannie Miller, the death of both Sarah Miller and Patrick Sheppard within the same week was like a divine slap. A fuck-you from the powers that be, trying to tell her something, like maybe her child didn’t deserve to know her grandparents, and she didn’t give a shit what the powers that be thought, because losing her mother and her father-in-law within the same week was more than any of them deserved.

At least, like some sort of reprieve, David and her could grieve together, support each other through it, hold onto the shards of their family and try to rebuild what they could. David answered the phone calls directed to Jeannie, because after a couple of insulting calls from reporters about her opinion on the deputy Prime Minister, as if she cared when she was trying to arrange a funeral, she couldn’t take a call without either screaming or crying.

She answered the calls from most of David’s coworkers and the Wall Street CEOs and lawyers that saw this as a chance to get into his back pocket, sneak in and usurp all his power without him being any the wiser until it was too late.

Madison was too young to do much more than cry and gurgle. She hadn’t even met Jeannie’s mother yet—they’d had a tentative weekend in the next few weeks where she was supposed to finally meet her granddaughter, and now…

Jeannie pressed her lips together to stop herself from crying, again, and brushed a gentle finger over Madison’s soft forehead as she slept, wishing with all the world that her child could’ve grown up with grandparents. This was—it was hard. Really, really hard, to the point where she didn’t even care about how articulate she was.

They’d arranged for the funerals to be a couple of days apart, though the state of Canada had mostly decided upon her mother’s funeral without listening to a word she had to say on the matter. They thought it best to get them both over with, in quick succession, like ripping off a bandaid. Or two.

The notifications went out to close family and friends, and while both wakes were set to be large enough to accommodate any people that might feel the need to attend, there were two smaller services later in the week, for family and close friends. To say goodbye.

Jeannie spent the entire week crushing David’s hand and holding Madison just a little tighter, a little closer. Trying to deal with the hordes of people descending on them, offering condolences for people they’d never even met in person, and if it was empty and left Jeannie feeling bitter, she didn’t let it show on her face.

But the wakes had passed, as had the exhaustion of having to deal with so many people and spend so much time in the public eye, smiling sadly until the muscles in her face started to twitch, repeating the same verbose speech about how much her mother meant to the country and to her. No one really knew her mother, not the way she did. They didn’t hear about the bedtime stories that persisted into young adulthood, the girl’s shopping days where they got to wear ridiculous hats and large sunglasses and pretend they were celebrities, dressing up the guards and giggling like schoolgirls. No one else knew about that because she didn’t tell them. These people, all of them that only knew her as a political leader, didn’t deserve to know the real Sarah Miller. That alone was hers to keep.

Patrick Sheppard’s service was first, on Friday the thirteenth of a gorgeous September afternoon. None of the high-end CEOs were invited, or even informed—David had made it quite clear that he didn’t want his father’s send off to be a business meeting. There were Sheppard relatives, distant and close, along with the few people that Patrick Sheppard had counted as friends, people he’d known for most of his life that didn’t give a shit about how much money he’d come into, just that he was doing well. People from Maria’s family, most of which David hadn’t seen since his mother’s funeral.

They’d asked David to give a speech, and he’d stumbled up there, straightened his suit and tried to keep his voice even as he recited his piece, this time with a tad more emotion than he’d had for the public wake. Jeannie knew David was of the opinion that his father wouldn’t have cared about whatever he had to say, was probably annoyed at how much time was wasted to mourn for what had already gone, but Jeannie liked to think that even Patrick Sheppard had a side of him not completely devoted to business efficiency.

If the private service was small, the lowering of the casket into the ground was even smaller, with Patrick’s half-brother that he hadn’t spoken to in years, a few close friends of Maria’s, a couple of guys he’d known from high school that had kept in touch. David, Jeannie, and a tiny, crying Madison.

Jeannie found his hand in hers when they lowered Patrick’s coffin, slowly and mechanically, into the ground. The priest was reading some passage, David wasn’t particularly concerned with the details, just stared at the decorated front of the carved wood, tried to piece together everything he was seeing with reality. He never let go of Jeannie’s hand, even when the act was done and everyone else had started to filter away, back to their lives.

At some point, even the priest left, and silence whipped through the wind, chilling them and leaving them stranded somewhere that neither of them quite knew how to navigate. David felt a little empty, and a little sick as he realized what he’d be doing come Monday morning, taking over the company and pretending he was anywhere as experienced as his father, like a puppet trying to play a puppeteer, still hopelessly relying on its strings.

Jeannie squeezed his hand, and she was warm, so warm, and so impossibly strong, despite having just lost her mother. He wanted to have the strength to be strong for her, come Sunday, when they repeated this entire process over again with her mother, up in Canada. Like some sort of sick, twisted time loop.

“Where’s John?” Jeannie’s voice carried over the wind, and David heard it, but he didn’t quite know how to answer. He’d thought—well, hoped, really—that John’s attempt at reconnecting with him would’ve meant that he’d at least have shown up for this, for their father’s funeral, but old grudges ran deep, and maybe John had only had enough room in his heart to forgive one of them.

It was barely a movement, but David shook his head in response, begged Jeannie to understand all the things he wasn’t saying. He was upset that John wasn’t here, but didn’t blame him. He wished John and Patrick could’ve forgiven each other, but knew things wouldn’t have worked out like that, no matter what the circumstance.

He regretted not trying harder to mend things between them, back in the beginning, but knew that he was almost as blinded by anger as his father had been back then. Knew what he was doing when he’d kept quiet, all the while listening to Patrick rage at John, force his ideals on him, push him away so strongly that John hadn’t stopped running until he’d hit fucking Antarctica, like maybe the white and the ice could erase what happened.

The anger he felt was worn, familiar after so many years of John simply not being there, and it didn’t sting nearly as much as the first time, or the second. It just felt natural by now, and David thought that was a shame, really.

Jeannie was shooting him concerned and questioning glances, trying to work out what the hard line of his lips and the furrow on his brow meant, and he shook his head again, letting out a breath in a puff. “He’s not—” He stopped, edited his words a little, “He wouldn’t.”

Jeannie understood enough to leave it at that, accept the silent admission of _I didn’t expect him to_ that David had neglected to say. He couldn’t fight John’s demons for him; he never could, despite all his trying. As much as David tried to understand, tried to see things from John’s perspective in those last few years before they’d all given up, he’d never quite worked out how one man could wage so many wars at once. It would’ve torn a lesser man apart, and the fact that John was still here, with everything David could see churning behind his eyes, was enough. David couldn’t possibly ask more of him, couldn’t ask him to finally face this one, just this single one, when it would be so much easier to forget it entirely, focus his attention on things that affected him now.

David didn’t blame him. John had more demons to contend with than the rest of them combined, and if ditching his father’s funeral was the only way to put one more to rest, David wasn’t going to start questioning his brother’s ethics.

Not now.

 

* * *

 

Jeannie’s brother, on the other hand, was an entirely different matter. It had already been a stressful enough week, and Jeannie was holding it together just barely, staying strong for the kid, maybe, or for David.

But the private service rolled around on a chilled Canadian morning, and while Jeannie was just as composed as she could’ve been, the minutes started ticking by and there was some slow-forming anger boiling deep inside her, not quite reaching the surface but always just close enough.

By the time everything was said and done, and Jeannie was holding a tiny bag filled with her mother’s ashes, she finally broke.

“I’m going to kill him,” She hissed, her hands clenched tightly around the bag as she frog-marched them all to the small creek at the edge of one of their properties, the place her mother had always gone to think and cool down. Madison was asleep in the carrier on David’s back, blissfully silent.

“Hm?” David prompted lightly, hoping his voice was just neutral enough to stop her from taking out all her anger on him. Of all the emotions he’d expected of her right now, this kind of pure rage was the last on the list, right after careless glee.

“Mer,” She clarified, giving a little humph and trying to pin a piece of hair behind her ear for the twelfth time. “He’s not here. I’ve called him six times and he won’t answer the damn phone!”

“Oh,” David replied, because at this moment in time, he didn’t have any particular condolences for his enraged wife. That was sort of the MO this time around, and while David thought he could understand John’s absence, Jeannie had never made it seem like her brother had any particular problems with their mother. Things hadn’t been peachy perfect, not when Jeannie was the prodigal child and Rodney was the black sheep, but it’d never gotten nearly as bad as it had been for John and Patrick.

“I don’t care,” she said stiffly, whacking away a branch as she stumbled down to the creek, “if he’s in Russia,” and another hard whack through the underbrush, “or quarantined for some ridiculous virus, or if all of Berkeley is sliding into the ocean,” she huffed her way to a stop next to the trickling water, staring down at it accusingly. “I don’t even care if he’s in jail, I. Will. Not. Forgive. Him.” Her fingers shook slightly as she zipped open the bag, and for a moment David was terrified she was going to accidentally spill her mother all over her feet, and the last thing she needed right now was something else to cry about.

In a silent gesture of support, he stepped up behind her, sliding his arm around her waist and pressing close. Jeannie was a strong woman, and David had never met anyone to say otherwise, but the way she was staring down at that bag of ashes like it could shatter her, he felt like he needed to be the one to hold her together, this time.

“He should be here,” she whispered, and her hands stopped shaking just as she held the bag out over the water. There was one moment where time stood still and the wind cut down, then it whipped around the trees again, and she slowly poured the powder-grey ash into the wind and water, scattering it over the rocks as it clouded the creek.

The tears didn’t come until a week later, when Rodney showed up at their door in some sort of frenzied mess with pain written into the lines of his face, and after Jeannie slapped him and yelled for a good minute, it was like the walls finally fell, and they held onto each other in desperation, trying to fill in the emptiness their mother had taken away with her.

When Jeannie padded into the bedroom that night, flicking the lights out and stumbling her way to the edge of the bed, she curled up against David with her head on his chest, listening to his breaths, their daughter safe and asleep just down the hall. He ran deft fingers through her hair, hummed a low lullaby for just the two of them, and whispered promises of family and love into her hair until they both drifted off.


	4. The Making of an Honest Man

Rodney was outraged at the idea that the university actually expected him to teach. Teaching was for those that couldn’t do, and Rodney could very well do, in fact, he was probably the only one in the entire physics department that had the slightest idea what was going on.

But apparently, there was some sort of clause in some contract he’d apparently signed that said he would teach one class every few semesters, and it afforded him more lab space and research funding if he accepted, so he signed himself up for a semester’s worth of telling all the students at the university exactly how stupid they were.

Maybe, if he sent another couple of students out crying, they’d agree that having him teach was a horrible idea and let him return to the lab, where his expertise was actually useful and not wasted on imbeciles.

Everyone kept on telling him that his teaching method was wrong, to which Rodney usually just responded with “I’m not a teacher, what could you possibly expect?” which shut them up well enough. Apparently, ranting at all the students and insulting their intelligence on a regular basis without actually answering questions he deemed too stupid to consider—well, it wasn’t fantastic teaching, but so what?

His students were all idiots, anyway, and wouldn’t learn anything no matter how he taught, because they couldn’t even grasp the basics.

One girl, though—She actually knew what the ΛCDM model was, wasn’t under the false impression that the Hadron Collider was going to spontaneously create a black hole that would suck up the earth, followed his math to a fine point, had golden brown hair with creamy skin and had a tendency to wear baby tees with physics jokes on them and she—She was a student.

She was off limits, absolutely never going to happen, no matter how brilliantly not-stupid she was or how many times she stayed after class to argue the finer points of Kavanagh’s most recently published bullshit article, and—and she was leaning over his desk, getting excited about the recent findings on the binary supermassive black holes at the center of Galaxy 0402+379, waxing lyrical about everything this meant for the world of physics and—

“Wanna get coffee with me?”

She blinked, and Rodney was trying to pry the shoe out of his mouth, and running through every single equation he knew that applied to time travel, but the best way to cover up his folly seemed to be to continue talking like he hadn’t just asked his student—a student—out for coffee. On a date.

He waved a hand around vaguely, tacked on “You seem marginally less moronic than the majority of this class and I find I actually enjoy listening to you talk, so I’m merely suggesting we continue this conversation over coffee and—”

“Okay,” she replied cheerily, smiling like he’d just shown her proof of the Higgs boson, and before Rodney had a chance to catch his breath and try to establish that this was to remain a strictly professional relationship, she was leaning over him to correct the list of students that he’d been told to make for the dean or someone, tapping the third name down on the list and chirping “By the way, my name is Jennifer Keller. Not Peller.”

And with the way a shock of hair swooped down to cover her eyes and hide her shy smile, Rodney was completely screwed.

 

* * *

 

John had known when the realtor had shown him the place that it’d be a fixer-upper. It was an older cabin, had a lot of nooks and crannies that had been neglected over the years, and John had relished in the way it reminded him of his grandparents’ place, the little farmhouse in Iowa that had been bulldozed years before so the highway could expand.

John didn’t have much by way of possessions; years in the Air Force had taught him to live light, because for all you knew, the place you left all your shit could be bombed while you were out. The realtor that sold him the house had seemed a little peeved that he wanted to move in right away, and that he didn’t need a moving truck, but she’s held her tongue when John simply ran down to the rental car and grabbed a duffel bag, throwing it next to the front door and smiling when he said “All done.”

By the beginning of October, he’d been the official owner of Midnight Mountainside Retreat—John had twitched a little when he’d found out the previous owners had already named the place—for one month. It had taken him two weeks to find himself a car—a worn Chevy Colorado, coincidentally—and figure out where the nearest hardware store was, so he could get to work on trying to repair the collapsed step to the porch or the rotting wooden shingles on the roof.

The projects helped to distract him from everything that had happened, because he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to deal with the fact that he’d dedicated his life to the Air Force only to get thrown out when the politicians back in the States that had never seen the wrong side of a bullet started hunting for someone to blame. To appease the public. Because war was all one giant business operation and the truth didn’t matter because it was all about the money.

Right. Best not to think about that, at all.

He called David once a week or so, when he remembered. They mostly talked about Maddie and whatever new trick she’d learned this week, most of them involving an array of bodily functions that John had spent a considerable amount of time laughing at Dave about. Things between them were still stiff and forced, but they were getting there, and it always helped when Dave put Jeannie on speakerphone and she started ranting about whatever was on her mind to fill the silence.

Neither John nor David brought up Dad, or John’s absence from the funeral. David had mentioned, lightly, something about John still being a major shareholder in the company with the inheritance, and John had simple changed the subject, because the last thing he cared about was that company or the money that kept appearing in his account, money John had never touched because he didn’t want to give his father the satisfaction.

Overall, things were settling down. John was looking around for work, had found a place that gave helicopter rides over and around the mountains for everyone that could pay. It was mostly rich tourists looking for a thrill or camera crews working on second rate movies, but it was in the air and they didn’t seem too put off by anything they’d seen in his record.

John had a house, and a job, and a niece, and a couple of local bars just a short drive down the mountain for when he felt like sex. He had the neighbors; the houses were too spread out around here to actually consider them neighbors, but they were near enough that John got a couple of welcome-to-the-area visits and didn’t mind walking over to Mrs. Abraham’s to ask questions about the best place to buy fresh corn or what the strange howling he’d heard last night had been.

He’d started volunteering down in the town at the local activity center, something of a Mecca for the people in the community, where they had a basketball court and hosted chess tournaments, and John had agreed to help out with the mixed martial arts classes some woman named Teyla was teaching, because he knew a bit about basic fighting and the kid working at the desk had mentioned that they would benefit from a “military perspective”, whatever that was.

John had never thought of himself as the small-town type, but he’d grown up in a mansion where manners were more important than friends and the rest of his time had been spent in the military, stationed in war zones, where the size of the town didn’t particularly matter unless you were trying to blow it up.

The tiny community of people living here though, crammed into the valley with the rest of the town or scattered around the surrounding mountains, were nice and more than willing to welcome him once they’d established that he wasn’t an ax murderer or a grumpy recluse.

John was starting to think that maybe he could build a life here. The kind of slow, comfortable life he’d never managed to find before, where things were safer and not so strict. His mother, had she been around, would’ve smiled like it was a secret, kept quiet because she was afraid to scare John away from it.

His father—well, it didn’t really matter what he thought anymore.

Maybe that was the reason John was willing to stay.

* * *

Jennifer was graduating at the end of the year, which was the only thing that kept Rodney from having something of a major panic attack and calling off this entire thing before the student-teacher relationship police came pounding down his door.

She was a medical student—Rodney had found that to be something of a shocker, with the way she was always talking about physics—but she’d called it a ‘hobby’ of sorts, and she was taking his class because she thought it sounded interesting, which was a lot more than any of the other students could say.

On their second date, she didn’t seem to mind the way he ranted at the waiter for three minutes about how imperative it was that there not be any citrus in any of the food, just smiled shyly and rolled her eyes in good humor when the waiter was looking ready to burst.

She was young, albeit only a few years younger than him, but she looked much younger, and he’d always figured himself to be at least five years older than his biological age simply because of intelligence quotient. Yet she managed to keep up with most of his rants, and she brought along a new perspective, not yet worn-out by years spent surrounded by people less intelligent and overly arrogant.

She was fun.

This was baffling to Rodney, because Rodney didn’t date fun. He didn’t really date at all, because the few times he had, it’d ended up in some sort of problem on the other person’s end, usually making it out to seem like it was his fault, which really, if any of the girls he’d dated had actually expected him to change? Pfft.

Jennifer, though, never gave him reproving looks when he said something potentially insulting in public, just sort of shrugged and gave an apologetic gesture to whoever he’d pissed off, and if he’d known that he just needed to find a girl willing to play his innocent sidekick, he might’ve been dating a lot sooner.

Classes were strange, at first. It’d been the morning after their third date, and he’d bustled into class as usual, laying everything out on the whiteboards and attempting to dumb down the equations within an inch of his tolerance, and then he started asking questions that he thought rhetorical, because he hadn’t expected any of his students to have an answer, but he’d spared a glance for the lecture hall on a whim, and there was Jennifer, dead center in the third row back, hand raised valiantly in the air with a little smirk on her lips.

Rodney was struck dumb for a moment, fading out of his sentence without any grace, gaping at Jennifer while his mind tried to piece together why the woman he was dating was in his class, because somehow the student-Jennifer and the girlfriend-Jennifer had separated themselves in his mind against his will.

Then there was a waterfall of questions the moment he nodded at her and she opened her mouth to start into an explanation about whatever it was he’d asked, forgotten now, because how often was he supposed to call on her? Not calling on her at all when she clearly had the answers was drawing attention to her, but calling on her too much would surely do the same?

And how perceptive were these idiots at Berkeley anyway? Surely one could throw a rock at their head and they’d fail to notice, so how could they possibly pick up on any sort of spark between Jennifer and him? Was there even a spark? It certainly felt like a spark, but there would be no sparking during class. Absolutely not, and what if one of the auditors showed up?

No, he had to pretend that the Jennifer in his class was just some random student he didn’t know, and things would work out fine, so long as they didn’t give anything away. Rodney could do careless indifference. He just had to imagine Jennifer as some—some imbecile, right, who happened to be giving all the stunning correct answers to all his questions, and maybe he should just stop asking questions altogether. Everyone else was wrong, teaching without interacting with the students was surely best. He was a genius after all, he could figure this out.

Jennifer’s voice had stopped echoing in the hall, so he assumed she was finished with whatever answer she gave. He blustered around a “Yes, yes, anyway,” and kept strictly turned toward the whiteboard for the remainder of the class to avoid any potentially embarrassing situations in which he caught another glimpse of Jennifer with that sexy smirk on her face and managed to blush, again, enough for the students to notice.

It was a testament to how completely insane Rodney had gone that he managed to find the danger in all this a little bit attractive.

This was kind of a disaster.

 

* * *

 

John was laid out on his back, blinking up at a dull white ceiling and trying to navigate his way back to himself.

“You are doing very well, John,” a soft, lilting voice called from somewhere over him. A hand appeared in front of his face, and he reached up to grip it and stumbled to rights again as the room stopped spinning.

“You’re kicking my ass, Teyla,” John said lackadaisically, and Teyla grinned in a quiet way that bespoke of her amusement. She had a glint in her eyes when she said “I cannot wait to introduce you to my bantos rods next week.”

“Oh, god, I don’t like the sound of that,” John replied, but he was smiling anyway, and the aches permeating throughout his body were familiar and felt good. Teyla was damn good at martial arts; years of teaching some sort of mix of every different type had taught her just the right way to kick someone’s ass. At least some of the kids might get a kick out of watching them spar.

“Perhaps you would benefit from attending my yoga classes?” Teyla suggested lightly as they headed toward the door and the noon sunlight, John rubbing at his shoulder and Teyla floating like she hadn’t just spent the last hour flipping John into the ground repeatedly.

“I don’t think so,” John said, wrinkling his nose in disdain, and Teyla laughed. “I’m sure the bruises will fade eventually,” he mused quietly, and gave her a grin and a brief wave as they parted ways at the door, John to drive down to the post office to take care of some bills and Teyla to set up for one of her classes later that afternoon.

John had a full roster of things to do today; he had to check in at Valley Air to sign a few forms before he could actually be allowed in their helicopter, and then he had to take a trip over to Boulder to grab some hard-to-find tools if he ever wanted to get the lower bathroom fixed up. Randomly pulling at the pipes under the sink had gotten him a face full of stale faucet water, and he’d decided to do a little more research before touching anything else.

He still had to call David, because he’d mentioned something important the last time they’d talked a few days ago, but the connection had gone out and neither of them had bothered to call back. It was strange talking to his brother because they didn’t have much in common and they refused to resort back to childhood stories, as most of those were tainted with bitter overtones by their father. A lot of their conversations revolved around Madison, or sometimes Jeannie, and John definitely didn’t mind talking about his niece one bit.

David had asked, a few times, whether John had found anyone in Colorado. John had changed the subject the first two times, and simply ignored it the third, to which David pulled the “You’re not getting any younger” card and then hadn’t brought it up again.

Figuring he knew the mountain roads well enough to navigate one-handed, he thumbed the speed-dial for David’s cell phone, because he could never keep track of which house he was staying at. It rang three times as he tapped his thumb against the wheel impatiently, then David answered with a somewhat breathless “David Sheppard.”

“Hey,” John greeted simply, leaving the air open for anything David had to get out of his system.

“Oh, hey,” David replied, a little surprised, then “Sorry, Maddie was screaming up a storm and Jeannie’s out, or something, and my phone was in the other room—”

“I can call back later,” John offered lightly, rolling his neck on his shoulders a bit and sparing a moment for what Dave’s life must be like with a baby in the house. She was only a year old, John didn’t feel like she needed much besides sleep and the occasional bottle, but everything John had ever heard about babies went against his assumption that it was easy, so he let it be.

“No, it’s fine, she’s settled down now. Christ, she’s got a set of lungs on her.” John smiled indulgently. “Anyway, what’s up?”

“Oh, you mentioned something about—” John paused, tried to work out what Dave had actually said. The conversation had been frenzied and a little jolty, with both of them distracted and not making much sense. “Telling me something?” John tried.

“I did?” David asked blankly, then “Oh! Yes, yes, I almost forgot. I haven’t slept in—it feels like days. I don’t actually know. But, yes, Jeannie’s pregnant.”

John waited a couple of beats, confused, letting the truck drift over the yellow line before jerking back into his own lane.

“Again,” David clarified shortly.

“Well, shit,” John summarized, and a ghost of a laugh rattled down the line from David’s end.

“I know,” David said. “I didn’t think I wanted to do all this again, but I guess I do. Just—She just told me, it’s not set in stone or anything, but…I’m really hoping it’ll be a boy this time.”

“Yeah,” John rasped out, then laughed on a single breath, clutching the wheel a bit tighter, seeing flashes of going to visit his niece and nephew on holidays, the both of them climbing all over him and giggling ridiculously loud. He was a little dizzy at the thought of it, because David hadn’t even mentioned holidays, and John wasn’t sure how far Dave’s hospitality was willing to go. Maybe it covered “being part of my kids’ lives” but didn’t quite reach “being part of mine”.

David was going on about Jeannie, and how excited she was despite the sleepless nights that Madison still had every now and then, and she was almost at the point where she was sleeping through the night, so David figured they’d have about eight months of slightly-more-than-none sleep and then there’d be another five to six months of high-pitched wails at godawful hours of the night. He sounded positively gleeful about it, and John felt himself smiling despite himself.

Maybe—and, christ, this wasn’t something he ever let himself think about—if he ever found someone, settled into the sort of domestic sprawl that David had, he’d figure out a way to have a kid, or something. It was never something he’d wanted before, not even when he’d been pretending to love Nancy, but maybe, if he ever had the kind of security and love that Dave had…

He really needed to stop thinking about this, before he actually started taking himself seriously.

The conversation came to a rolling stop, and John was almost at the turn for his drive, so he said goodbye and thumbed the phone off, hoping to grab something to eat before the drive out to Boulder. The sun was still beating the morning into submission, heating the air enough that John reveled in its warmth, knowing that in a few weeks time, winter would come bearing down on them and he’d need to figure out how the hell to drive in the snow in the mountains before he wound up in a ditch somewhere.

Stationed in Antarctica, he could’ve flown a helicopter in a blizzard with his eyes closed, but stick him in a truck in the snowy mountains of Colorado, and he was a dead man. John laughed at the irony, slamming the door to the truck closed with a crack, stepping up to the house and calculating the likelihood of Valley Air letting him take the chopper to go grocery shopping.

 

* * *

 

The first time Rodney slept with Jennifer, he’d scampered in the middle of the night while she was sleeping and called in sick for class the next day.

He knew exactly how ridiculous he was being.

They were dating. It wasn’t as if this was some unexpected one-night stand and he couldn’t remember her name so he’d simply skipped the awkward morning after part. Rodney would still have to see her, eventually, whether it was in class or because he really didn’t want this random panicking on his part to be the end of their relationship, which meant more dates.

She called him the moment his class was scheduled to let out, and he let the phone go to voicemail by convincing himself he was too busy heating up instant mac-and-cheese in the microwave to answer the phone. Because obviously, if he didn’t watch the mac-and-cheese spin and spin and bubble every second, it was going to burn.

She called him again later that night, and he was halfway through making up another excuse when some sort of rush of courage had him pressing the talk button and he let out a shaky “Hello?” as if he didn’t know who was on the other end of the line.

“Hey, Rodney,” Jennifer drawled, and okay, she was pissed. Rodney was never good at dealing with women who were pissed off—they were just so confusing, and their eyebrows made so many shapes, how could anyone be expected to know that many different facial expressions? It was even worse over the phone, when he had nothing but the tone of voice and his logic to help him along, and most times his logic told him that the exact words that were being said actually meant what they usually did, which turned out to be wrong 99% of the time.

“Um. Hi.” He didn’t trust himself to say much else than that.

“So, I must’ve gone to bed with a stranger last night, because when I woke up in the morning, no one was there, and I don’t know anyone who’s that much of an asshole.”

Rodney winced. He deserved that one.

“What the hell?” She asked, point-blank, anger laced through all of her words, making them spike at the end like they could prick his fingers.

“Okay,” Rodney hurried, “Okay, so I’m an asshole. This is a well-known fact. It’s just—I never know what to do when I wake up in someone else’s place! I don’t know what I’m allowed to touch or what I’m supposed to do or expect, and sometimes people don’t expect you to be there in the morn—”

“I’m your girlfriend,” Jennifer interrupted sharply, “I kind of expected you not to fuck and run.”

Rodney tried to ignore the barbs in her words that were slowly tearing at his skin, fighting down any sort of anger he had at the situation because Jennifer would read it the wrong way. “I—I realize that now,” Rodney amended softly, “But it was your place, and we don’t spend a whole lot of time there, what with the roommates, and I didn’t know if you’d be okay with the domestic morning-after-breakfast thing—”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Jennifer asked honestly, calmly, and her voice was too clear for Rodney to pretend not to have heard her.

“I—That.” He didn’t have an answer, and was trying to pull one out of thin air, but some tiny echo of a voice in a memory filtered back, and it told him that usually, when fighting with women, honesty was approved over blatant bullshitting, so instead he responded “I don’t know.”

Jennifer waited a long moment before responding, like she was a little stunned by Rodney willing to admit there were some things he did not know, and those were totally points in his favor, so maybe this wouldn’t go horribly, horribly wrong after all.

“Are you afraid of the domestic morning-after thing?” Jennifer flipped it around on him, and Rodney hated it when people directed his own questions back at him like they were an answer, because Rodney rarely asked questions as it was, and he usually liked his questions to remain questions, not morph into some sort of accusation or test.

“No,” He replied shortly, and realized it was true. “But you’re young, and I figured you might freak out a little if I decided to make breakfast and sit at your kitchen table with a mug of coffee and the newspaper like it was my proper place.”

There was another lull in the conversation, and Rodney was reeling, trying to figure out what he’d said and why it had been the wrong thing to say and how he could fix it, but Jennifer stopped him.

“Somehow I don’t think you’re capable of making breakfast.” Her tone was light; she was joking. Rodney felt like a concrete brick had just been lifted from his chest, because if she was joking then it probably didn’t mean “I’m going to break up with you in about three seconds” and that was generally a good thing, considering Rodney’s track record.

“I can make toast,” Rodney replied immediately, adding “usually” just to make her laugh. “Sorry,” he said, because he didn’t know if he’d said that yet, and women tended to love apologies.

She paused again, and Rodney was really beginning to hate these little silences, because he couldn’t see her face so he could never know if it was the good kind of silence or the bad, and he was already bad enough with people as it was, he didn’t need more reason for confusion.

Then, “Wanna move in together?”

Rodney spun in place for about a minute before stuttering out an automated response, “What?”

“I just figured,” Jennifer paused, and Rodney imagined her either chewing on her bottom lip, twirling a strand of hair, or shrugging, or possibly all three. “Well, my roommates are moving out in a couple of weeks, and I’ve been looking for someone to move in so I can keep paying the rent, and I know you aren’t attached to that tiny, crappy apartment of yours because you still haven’t unpacked everything from your last move. I mean, why not?”

Rodney carefully considered that, decided it wasn’t in his best interests to list off everything that had been on his list of Reasons Living With Me Is A Bad Idea, and chanced it with a “Are you sure you’d be okay with that? I’ve been told I’m impossible to live with. As in, literally impossible.”

But Jennifer just laughed, bell-like and open, and said “Everything about you is impossible, Rodney. I think I can manage.”


	5. Light On Your Feet

 It was the first time John had been in the air since Antarctica, and it felt like a breath of fresh air. There was freshly fallen snow everywhere but it was clear now, the sun shining low over the pale landscape so that it glittered gold, and any previous contentions he’d had about working on Christmas Eve flew right out the window and got whisked away on the wind.

David had offered for John to come over for Christmas, all the way up to Canada, and John had been surprised and a little happy at the revelation that David actually cared. But there were scarcely any flights open by the time John looked, and they’d been expecting a massive snowstorm immediately after Christmas. John still wasn’t confident in his house’s ability to withstand the winter weather, so he’d gathered a bunch of munitions in case he got snowed in, which wasn’t as ridiculous-sounding as he thought around here, and promised to stay the course.

David had been a little disappointed, mostly considering that this meant he’d be spending the entirety of Christmas with the Miller (or something) family, and when John carefully mentioned “I thought Jeannie only had a brother,” David groaned and said that was exactly the problem. Apparently, Madison’s other uncle was enough Miller to drive anyone up the wall. John had just laughed.

He was planning on a small Christmas with the townspeople. Teyla was helping to throw together some sort of party, and while there were some families that chose to spend Christmas on their own or out of town, John was surprised to find that a good deal more had wanted to stay. John chalked it up to another small-town fact he didn’t previously know; holidays in small towns were community events.

One way or another, it was a far cry from the Christmases he’d experienced as a child, and besides, he got to be up in this chopper, watching over the crystal landscape, flying his own route and his own way because the guy that had hired him wanted a local’s perspective.

John had originally wanted to punch the guy out for making him work Christmas and saying the word ‘local’ like it was an insult, but all that was forgotten in the air, because no matter how much money and confidence he had to throw around back on the solid earth, up here it was just him and his fiancée, holding hands and gazing out over the swirls of snow, nearly level with the snow caps on the mountain.

John smiled, happy that he’d agreed to take this job, and did a quick little dip through the space between two mountains, close enough to flurry the snow but still not close enough to freak out his clients. This was different from flying an F-16, so different, but it was still flying, still flinging himself into the air, and that he could have this, despite what he’d lost, made him the luckiest man on the planet.

He didn’t want to touch down—never did, really—but the guy that was fluttering about his girl in the back had only paid for an hour, so John returned to the Valley Air landing pad and touched her down. The other workers helped his clients out of their gear and down onto solid ground again, wobbly-legged and dizzy. John went through his post-flight check, shut down, climbed out and glided toward the door to the offices, the look of pure elation unmistakable on his face.

John had thought he would’ve missed the Air Force, would’ve been lost without the strict guidelines and straight paths, but it was much different than that. He would’ve missed flying, missed the speed and the planes and that weightless feeling, but now that he could have this—this little piece of the sky that was still his, he found that he couldn’t care less that they’d kicked him out on his ass.

He had the best of both worlds; the sky and a home, and now that he’d discovered this, he didn’t think they could drag him back into service even if they paid him. Or shot him.

That messy swirl of giddy thoughts was still bobbing around in his head when he finally made it down to the activity center, where Teyla was meandering through decorations and groups of playing children, quietly directing and leading people to where they needed to be. John gave a little wave when she turned and smiled at him from across the room, and she tiptoed around scattered decorations and stray toys before greeting him warmly.

“All this for one party?” John asked, a little skeptically, searching through all the bodies for the things he’d missed before: a tiny Christmas tree, set up for the children to decorate in echo of their parents with the real tree. The menorah on the windowsill, five candles lit and burning just a little brighter than the setting sun.

“Of course, John,” Teyla said, as if he should understand all of this already. “The people of Athos Valley are all willing to contribute to something that benefits the whole community.” She’d gotten her teaching voice on, and John let it be because Teyla was probably right, anyway. He’d just never grown up around this kind of thing, he didn’t know where he fit.

Teyla silently solved that problem for him, though, when some kid came up to her with a bunch of streamers and garland trailing from her arms, requesting someone tall that could put the garland up where it needed to be. John was volunteered before he got a say so, and the next two hours passed in a blur of fake pinecones and poinsettias, and when John finally took a moment to stop and look around, what had been a disaster area was now a complete transformation.

The decorations were simple and rang of small-town closeness, with personalized ornaments made from macaroni or popsicle sticks popping out every now and then, but everything glittered and John couldn’t help but smile.

Most of the people that had been there to help went home to change into evening wear, so it was just Teyla, a few extra volunteers busy trying to set up the table for the punch, and John, who really didn’t feel like driving all the way back to the house just to change into a slightly less wrinkled copy of the shirt he had on now.

“I never knew there were so many Christians here,” John said conversationally, leaning back against a small table before an older woman glared at him so sharply that he scattered away from it before she set fire to his shirt with her mind.

Teyla blinked at him, then offered “There are not, really. Many of the people in this town are outcasts. They were not cut out for the city life so they came here, looking for solace. With so many mixed people, there is no majority religion. I myself am not Christian.”

It was John’s turn to try to catch up a little, furrowing his brow as he thought. “Then why the Christmas party?”

Teyla gestured around the room lightly, and John’s eyes followed her arm, not seeing much else than what he already had. “This is not solely a Christmas celebration,” she explained calmly. “There are many different religions represented for those that follow one. This is a community event. It is to celebrate those gifts that we have in life, and the people we share them with, in the spirit of the holiday season and the new year.”

John looked around the room again at her words, spotting a couple of weavings that looked foreign in origin, a tiny buddhist statue perched under a Christmas tree, a flag with the crescent moon and star on it, something he thought was Islam. “Huh,” he responded.

“Forgive me for my bluntness, but you are not Christian, yet you are here.” John briefly wondered how it was Teyla knew he wasn’t Christian, but Teyla was a perceptive woman, and she’d probably noticed the way he withdrew from conversations when they got around to events happening at the nearest chapel in the town over. “I would assume,” Teyla continued, “that many other people are attending for the same reasons you are.”

She didn’t ask what his reasons were, simply smiled and announced that she had to go change, her dress hanging up in a garment bag in her office. When they’d first met, John had briefly wondered if Teyla lived in her office, because she was constantly at the activity center and John never saw her leave or come in, plus she always seemed to have everything she needed in there. Thing you normally wouldn’t bring to work, like evening gowns.

But she’d mentioned something about a boyfriend, though she’d used the term “partner” and hadn’t referred to him by name yet. Unless she was dating the ghost that lived in the ventilation system, she must have a home somewhere around there.

John shifted uncomfortably around on his feet, not quite sure what to do with himself during these in-between moments, and opted to go hit the punch before it got warm, though he’d probably be back after one of the rebellious teenagers managed to spike it, as if all the adults didn’t recognize the taste of alcohol immediately. John was fairly sure all the young ones were oblivious to the fact that if they hadn’t spiked the punch by a couple hours in, one of the adults would, just because everything was a little bit more fun with alcohol.

Teyla was playing hostess, greeting the early birds at the door in a brilliant dusty purple gown with a lacy top fading into drapes of fabric. John tugged at his shirt, feeling a little underdressed and out of place, but soon enough there were a larger array of people there, and John wasn’t the only one dressed in a nice shirt and simple black pants that were really just cleverly disguised jeans.

The evening was filled with dancing and well-wishes, and John was roped into quite a few conversations with the townspeople he hadn’t yet taken the time to get to know. He was pleasantly surprised to find that the television portrayal of small towns and closed communities was stunningly wrong when it came to Athos Valley; none of these people were remotely like hicks, and they didn’t shun John for being an outsider.

Teyla’s mystery man showed up about an hour in, and she properly introduced him as Kanaan before they took to the dance floor, swirling over the sparsely populated floor with an ease and natural excitement that couldn’t be faked. That spurred a number of other couples to take to the floor, some a bit more awkward than Teyla and Kanaan, but all of them pleasantly good-spirited and possibly a little drunk, with the way the teens had been eyeing the punch lately.

John smiled, watching these people that he’d built his new life around, happily trying to match names to faces in the crowd, surprised every time he knew someone, but didn’t remember where from. He supposed, in small towns like this, it was something like instinct to be able to recognize anyone on sight.

He didn’t feel awkward standing alone by the side of the dance floor, one hand in his pocket and the other holding the scotch he’d gotten from the youth director’s private stash in the storage closet, but he must’ve looked it to the women that decided to approach him.

The first one that came up, he recognized as the daughter of the owner of the general store on the corner of the main road and the one John took into town. She was older than John had originally thought, probably old enough to run the shop by herself, but John’s mind still categorized her as a child because he knew her parents.

That didn’t seem to stop her from flirting with him. It took him a good few minutes of conversation to even realize that was what was happening, and the moment he did, he sort of spaced out and she had to say his name a good few times before he snapped back to attention.

“Sorry, what?” He asked, trying to modify his tone into something that sounded nothing at all like flirting, but he was horrible at this and really rather avoided it if he could.

“Do you want to dance?” She repeated, a little impatiently, and that just made her seem even younger and more immature. John swore her parents were here anyway, and while she was old enough to make her own decisions, that didn’t mean that John didn’t fear her father, because he was a mammoth of a man and could probably snap John like a twig.

He shook his head carefully, saying “I don’t dance,” which was at least the truth, and shot her a speculative look that he hoped said what are you even doing asking me? He didn’t want to purposely make himself out as a jerk, but he also wanted to get her off his case as soon as possible, before anyone that knew her father—which was everyone, really—came around and assumed the worst.

She shrugged, gave something of an exasperated eye-roll, and stalked off. John imagined she probably got that a lot, because everyone in this town knew her father and his penchant for protecting his daughter’s virtue. John didn’t think she looked like a particularly virtuous girl, but that wasn’t any of his business.

By the time the third woman had propositioned him for a dance, which John correctly read as code for something more, he realized that he’d been acting exactly how single guy looking for a date would act. He attempted to shuffle over to the table with the appetizers on it, helped himself to some nog because it was there, and contemplated exactly how many single women there were in this town.

He was wondering if he should maybe head out, but before he could make any decision one way or another, Teyla swung over and said lightly “Kanaan believes I should ask you to dance.”

“What?” John asked, “no, I don’t dance.”

Teyla quirked an eyebrow at him, then said “It is easy. I will teach you.”

“Teyla, I really don’t—” but before he could finish, she had a strong hand around his wrist and was dragging him away from the safety of the wall he’d been leaning on. He’d hardly managed to set his egg nog down before she’d whipped him away and into some kind of dance that probably had more confusing steps than the weird shuffle John was attempting.

John shot her a glare, because she had a mischievous glint in her eyes, and John bet more than anything Kanaan hadn’t said a word on the subject, because he was quite engaged with a seven-year-old that wanted to learn how to properly dance.

Teyla laughed, the both of them close enough for intimate conversation without eavesdroppers, and said in a light hum “If I had not asked you to dance, you would have spent the entire night leaning on those walls you are so fond of.”

“Which would’ve been fine by me,” John shot back, but Teyla either missed the hint of real anger in his voice or just found it amusing, because she was still grinning perceptively and swinging him around. John wasn’t sure, because he didn’t know dancing that well, but he thought most people could probably tell Teyla was leading with one glance. It bothered him less than he thought it would.

“You seem to have turned down many opportunities to dance,” Teyla commented, and John tried to read into the words to see if she was trying to lead into anything more, but she was a master at social interaction, and John doubted he’d be able to glean anything useful from the tone of her voice. Not unless she wanted him to.

She would probably make a brilliant spy.

John shrugged, mock carelessly, replied simply “Not my type.”

Something clicking in Teyla’s eyes, and John didn’t even get a moment to cut her off with anything before she said quietly “I get the feeling that many women are not your type.”

Well, there it was, and John wasn’t sure if he should be panicking or lying his way out of this, so he sort of stalled and did nothing. That was apparently a prompt for Teyla to continue, soft and sympathetic, “You will not be ostracized for this, John. As I have said, many of this town’s people were outcasts themselves. They have found home here. You may, as well.”

John muttered something along the lines of “Yeah, well, you’d be surprised,” but Teyla ignored him and finished the dance in a flair of footwork and a spin. She smiled brightly at John as he gave her a shy smile and retreated back to the refreshments table, pouring himself a rather large amount of punch, hoping like hell it was spiked.

Christ, what was he getting himself into?


	6. If At First

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I added in a fix that should've cleared up any confusion about the time jump that happened in my head, but never actually made it into the story (because I am all the fail). Sorry about that!
> 
> (May 31, 2012)

 

Jeannie wasn’t one to get upset about most things. She preferred, much like her brother, to charge forward and completely ignore any sign of weakness until things eventually started to feel normal again. Otherwise, she just got angry.

David seemed to understand this pretty well, considering most of her past boyfriends had broken up with her after they’d seen her in one of her rages. David, so far, had witnessed at least three, and he hadn’t left after any of them. He hadn’t even looked at her differently.

That’s probably why she married the guy.

So when Jeannie finally managed to get herself back the doctor while David was free, and was politely informed in the least sympathetic manner she’d ever heard from a doctor that she’d had a miscarriage, David braced himself for the yelling and the blaming and the throwing things about the room aimlessly until something finally broke.

He did not, however, prepare himself for the way Jeannie withered in front of him, like a flower sitting in the sun all day with no water, her shoulders slumping, her eyes losing that bright, happy glow, her entire face paling as if she were going to be sick.

He had no idea what to do. On the one hand, she could burst into a fit of rage at any moment, in which case he’d prefer to be across the room, giving her some space, but on the other hand—

“Jeannie—” He started, reaching out to try to tuck a strand of golden hair behind her ear.

“Don’t,” she said, strikingly calm and without any inflection, and David dropped his hand instantly, letting it dangly limply by his side, watching as she slowly pulled in on herself, her hands clenched over her knees and still, no longer willing to rest over her still-flat stomach. It was breaking his heart.

The D&C was scheduled for a few days later, and David kept asking Jeannie if she wanted him there with her, if she wanted anything at all, what he was supposed to do, but she kept repeating that she was fine, she didn’t need him there, it was alright. He came anyway, but she refused to let him in the room, so he spent his time pacing in the waiting room, worrying himself sick about Jeannie and wondering if Maddie was alright with the babysitter. By the time Jeannie came out with hollow eyes and the kind of desperate determination on her face to stay calm, he’d started trying to figure out the number of days he could keep dealing with this before he cracked, and what to do about it before it came to that.

Jeannie stopped talking. There had been stilted conversations before, just simple things like “pass the salt” or “Maddie’s awake” but now she didn’t say anything. David spent most of his nights lying beside her, staring at the dim outline of her shoulder in the dark, trying to tell her it was okay without making her flinch away.

There were books about this, he knew. They had them in the house. Ways of coping with this, what was natural and expected and what was…not. But he couldn’t bring himself to read them, or try to follow anything in them. They were books. This was their life. There was a difference and David wasn’t willing to define their life by the terms in some book.

At least Jeannie wasn’t avoiding Madison. David knew that was beyond his abilities, venturing into something strikingly similar to postpartum depression that they’d need to find help for. But Jeannie, after the first day, got up with Madison in the night as much as usual. On certain nights when David couldn’t sleep and Jeannie had been out of bed for awhile, he would silently sneak through the house and find her sitting in the rocking chair, staring out the window with Madison pressed close, whispering things to her that weren’t meant for David’s ears.

During the day, though, talking to Jeannie was like talking to a brick wall, complete with the stony-faced stubbornness he was all too practiced with. Eventually, David just kept on talking to her as if she were responding, developing this sort of monologue that one would use around their dog, the kind of way people talk to inanimate objects, and it was a little sad but it was all he knew how to do.

David had even called Rodney at some point, but he’d been in the middle of something that sounded suspiciously like sex and he blatantly admitted that he didn’t know Jeannie well enough to know what David was supposed to do about her “mood swing” because Rodney couldn’t shut his mouth long enough to actually let David explain what was causing her off behavior. He thought maybe it was something best kept to themselves, anyway.

Every time David thought he saw some glimmer of change, some light in Jeannie’s eyes or the twitch of a smile on her lips, he wound up sadly mistaken when it was a trick of the light, or when Jeannie returned to her blank state, and it was like living with a robot.

He was debating whether or not to call the company psychologist and beg for advice when the break finally came. In the back of his mind, David had always sort of assumed something like this was looming, but as each day had passed by with no change, he was thinking maybe this was different. Maybe it was serious, and something that wouldn’t resolve itself.

It was the middle of the afternoon, David had spent the morning with Madison, attempting to teach her to say “Mommy” even though all the books said it was much too soon. Jeannie had taken some time off work after this entire thing happened, and she had yet to go back. David had been starting to push for her to go back, get back to some sort of normalcy in the hopes that things would work themselves out.

Madison had just gone down for her afternoon nap and David had been trying to tiptoe out of the room when some tiny, animal-like whimper came from the bathroom down the hall, bouncing off the porcelain walls. He tried to be silent in his approach but must’ve made some sort of noise, footsteps or floorboards creaking or a hint of a breath, because Jeannie’s head snapped up and piercing blue eyes found him, pinned him to the back of his skin, and he tried not to freak out. She was curled around the toilet, like the few nights when they’d still been much too young and Jeannie had a bit too much to drink. It was only three years ago.

The skin around her eyes shone, wet and a little red, and it was so rare that he caught her in a moment like this, fragile and exposed.

She tried to shut the door, slam it in his face from her position on the floor, but her fingertips did little more than skirmish the tip of the wood and she gave up after that, no energy left.

“Dave.” She sounded broken and unsure and terrified, and he couldn’t stand it, didn’t know how much more he could take of her like this, suddenly found himself with an armful of warmth and shakiness. He didn’t know who moved first.

Her back heaved under his palms, lungs beating and pressing against her ribs and her spine and her skin. He felt like someone had taken all his words, tied them into knots and chewed them up and spat them back at him, useless and faded. She was crying again, clinging like he meant everything to her now, and it was with nauseous, dawning realization that he understood he very well might be, besides Madison. That was a lot of weight to bear.

He didn’t know how to fix this. He didn’t even know if this could be fixed. They’d both felt the pain of loss, the desperation tearing its way through their blood as one, and somehow it seemed like so much less when they combined it. Even if he couldn’t fix it, he could try to fix her. Jeannie deserved to be fixed, after so many flailing, angry years spent at sixes and sevens with her brother or her parents or her peers, never quick enough to keep up with her. No one had ever been there to fix her when she needed it. They were all so busy outsmarting one another.

But he could fix her. David felt more than knew it, saw it in the pinch of her eyes and the stutter of her breath and the tensing of her grip. She was cracked but not broken and irreparable. That was important. The distinction was important, to him. It mattered because she mattered.

So with heaving breath and chilling certainty, he did what he could, whispers of words that weren’t his, but said everything he needed right now.

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

He laughed softly and thought maybe he needed to hear them, too.

* * *

It was strange for John, getting regular phone calls from his brother. His entire life, he’d never had anyone to call him unless it was related to business, and once he was deployed, that hadn’t been an issue. It wasn’t like phones were much use when you were stranded in the middle of the desert, waiting for the sandstorm to blow in and bury you. If even the government-issue radios had problems with those conditions, phones weren’t going to do anyone much good.

But he was grateful, either way, to have some connection to someone beyond himself. Not just with David and his family, but Teyla too. Even Carson, the town doctor (and vet) was starting to work his way into John’s life. Strange, too, since John hadn’t exactly anticipated having much in common with an anxious Scottish doctor, while he was waiting to be called by the nurse—Jennifer—for yet another thing Valley Air required before they continued to let him fly their helicopters. His fingers were developing tiny scars from being pricked so much. He was fairly certain Jude, his boss, was under the impression he didn’t know they were doing drug tests near every damn week. John passed, of course, and would continue to do so, but he’d much prefer they tell him flat-out why he had to spend a part of his Sunday at the clinic, rather than straining to find some other “test” he hadn’t taken yet.

But every time David called, it brought a strange, warm feeling to John’s chest, even when the following conversation—especially as of late—came bearing anything but good news.

“Hey,” John answered, plopping down into his chair and flicking the television on, muting it immediately so he could hear David talk.

“Hi, John, I was hoping I’d catch you,” David said offhandedly, like he was distracted. “Do you remember that—” he paused, and there was a ruffling sound, like papers, and then David’s voice faded back in, like he’d put down the phone and had leaned away from it when he started talking. “That box we had, with mom’s old things? Jewelry, photos…do you remember it?”

“Yeah,” John replied, a little taken aback at first. It was rare that David ever brought up anything from before they’d started talking again, and even rarer for him to mention mom. “What about it?”

David sighed, shifted the phone around some, and then seemed to stop whatever searching he was doing and concentrate on the conversation. “I’ve been trying to find it. Jeannie is in this crazy scrapbooking mood lately, and she got this idea in her head to make some sort of scrapbook about our side of the family, and she’s been hounding me for pictures of us, and mom and dad, from way back.”

“Oh,” John deadpanned, trying to decide how to feel about this—a woman he’d only met a few times, suddenly digging through the scraps of his life, piecing things together that were private, that were supposed to be his wounds, the ones only David and him knew about. But then again, he couldn’t fault Jeannie for it—she wasn’t some bloodthirsty reporter, begging for scraps to twist around into some misshapen distortion of their family, she _was_ family. And it was natural to be a little curious about that. Madison would probably want to know, at some point. “No,” he replied, belatedly, and he can hear David searching again. “I haven’t seen that in years. Did you check the old house?” John very pointedly does not call it _Dad’s house._

“Yeah,” David said, forlornly, “I was out there last week. Nothing. Maybe it just got lost…” David trailed off, and John sat there, listening to the rustling on the other end of the line, trying to piece together exactly what it was he was feeling. It wasn’t the same as before, when they’d spoken about mom and dad, even in the most obscure sense. John didn’t try to change the subject like it was poison. It was still uncomfortable, but in the aftermath of his father’s death, a lot of these previously taboo subjects between him and David had started opening up again. Maybe it was just the time passing.

“I didn’t mean to—” David cut in sharply, pulling John back from wherever it was he’d gone. “I know it still bothers you, and I don’t want to start a fight again, believe me, it’s just that—” he huffed and then hissed out a swear after some strange, banging noise. He sounded frazzled, for lack of a better word, and John smiled a bit at the image in his mind. “It’s been crazy around here. Madison is getting to that age, I swear, even if Jeannie says it’s still a ways off. She’s been driving me crazy, too. Don’t get me wrong—I love the woman—but lately she’s been so erratic, and she keeps swearing it’s because she’s nesting but I don’t remember this the last time she was pregnant, and—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” John interrupted, because he hadn’t heard anything about Jeannie being pregnant again. Well, he had, but then… “She’s pregnant again?”

“Oh shit,” David said pointedly, and John just waited him out. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you, yet. We were going to wait until at least three months, to be absolutely certain but—well, it’s a few weeks early but yes. She’s—yes.” David sounded winded, and John couldn’t tell if it was from tearing whatever room he was in apart, looking for some old, dusty box, or from finally telling John about this.

“Wow, um,” John said, uncertain. “Congratulations,” he decided on, and then before he convinced himself not to, “Is she—Are you both…okay?” John berated himself for sounding like he had a third grade vocabulary, but David didn’t seem to notice in the wake of the conversation suddenly turning to the miscarriage Jeannie had had what seemed like such a short time ago. It had rocked them all a little hard, especially when it happened so late.

“Yeah,” David assured him quickly, “yeah, we’re both great. She—It was really hard on her, I think, more than me. But once she stopped thinking that she was poison and that we were going to lose Merideth, too, she came around.”

“Merideth?” John questioned, skeptically, trying to keep up with all this information being thrown at him, all at once.

“The baby. Well, the name’s not set in stone yet—Jeannie’s brother will probably kill us in our sleep, so we could wind up with Maria,” John’s breath caught at the reference to his mother, but David just kept talking, whether or not he noticed. “But that’s if it’s another girl. Jeannie swears it’s a boy this time, and she keeps calling it ‘Theodore’, even though I voted for Cole, because I really wasn’t planning on naming my first-born son after a president, which of course _she_ has no compunctions about because she’s Canadian.” David huffed out another breath and John could tell he was rolling his eyes.

He laughed. Regardless of what John’s opinion of David’s work was, he was at least sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that David was going to be a much better father than their father had ever been to them. He was learning to forgive the small things—the ones that had seemed so monumental when they had years of silence between them, and the constant, looming presence of their father hanging over them. He had never liked the idea of his niece growing up surrounded by so much wealth and fame, worried that she’d be forced to put on a false front from the time she was old enough to walk, paraded around like status symbols, as John and David had always been when they were kids.

But David wasn’t the reincarnation of their father, despite John’s previous misconceptions, and Jeannie, for all the reticence John had about David marrying some faux-princess from Canada, was down-to-earth in a way he hadn’t expected, and really, if he were honest with himself…reminded him of his own mother.

He let David prattle on about trying to cope with the two crazy girls in his life, and the one more he was convinced was on the way, and John let the smile slowly tug at the corners of his lips, working its way into his life in the same sneaky way everyone else had done.

* * *

In retrospect, Rodney probably should have waited for Jennifer to tell him herself, rather than prove he’d been snooping around in her things by bringing it up himself. But anger does that to someone, makes logic seem a little bit useless, and Rodney probably deserved every bit of it he got shot back at him.

“It’s none of your business!” Jennifer shouted, after Rodney had asked her, for the fifth time, why she was planning on moving to Indonesia for a year.

“It is my business!” Rodney argued, “We’re dating! We’re living together, you can’t just fuck off to Indonesia and expect me to wait for you—”

“I don’t!” Jennifer shot back, and her fingers were gripped around the arch of the chair, shaking and pale with rage. “I don’t expect you to wait.”

“Well, what, you want me to go with you?” Rodney snorted derisively. “Right, because they even know what physics is in Indonesia!”

“No,” Jennifer said, short and clipped, like she was reining back her anger. “No, you’re not going to Indonesia.” The eerie calm tipped Rodney off that she was maybe making a decision, behind the steady exterior that radiated anger and energy, the gears were clicking together in new ways and locking into place.

“So, what, then?” Rodney asked, snide and arrogant. “You’re just leaving? ‘Sorry, Rodney, nice fling and all, but you’re just not as important as a bunch of malnourished jungle people’.”

“Yeah, maybe you aren’t!” Jennifer shouted, angrily brushing a strand of hair behind her ear for the hundredth time that night. “Not if you’re going to keep being such an asshole about this!”

“I’m the asshole?” Rodney raged, swiftly turning on her, pinning her with a glare, his hands curled into fists at his side. “Were you even planning on telling me?” Jennifer visibly flinched at that, and Rodney very nearly smirked in satisfaction, but it hurt just a little to much to realize that he was taking pleasure from hurting Jennifer.

“Yes,” she stated shortly, pressing her lips together in a tight line, draining the color from them, and Rodney could see the panic in her eyes, so he pushed it further.

“When?” He shot back immediately, not waiting for an answer. “You’re graduating in two weeks! They expect you there by the end of the month, when the hell were you going to tell me? What, two hours before you left?” She was upset now, fighting back a couple of tears streaming down her cheeks against her will, but he ignored them, too angry to care. “Sorry, Rodney, I’m leaving. By the way, you need to find a new place to live and maybe a new girlfriend, too—”

“You can keep the place!” she challenged bravely, bottom lip quivering defiantly.

“No, I can’t!” He retorted, and his anger was giving way slowly to something a little too familiar, a little bit too much like heartbreak. “Everything reminds me of you.” His voice was softer than he’d expected, but still clinging to his anger like a shield, like maybe if he stayed angry, it wouldn’t hurt. “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me,” he admitted quietly, looking down and clenching his jaw to keep from saying anything else embarrassing.

“Rodney, this could be the most important move of my career! You wouldn’t ask me to—”

“No,” Rodney interrupted, suddenly angry again, “No, I wouldn’t, and you knew that, didn’t you?” She snapped her mouth shut, and the guilt was written into the lines of her face, the shine in her eyes. He had his answer. “I can’t deal with you anymore, I’m going for a walk.” he admitted, storming around to grab his coat and keys from the rack next to the door.

She seemed like she was struggling between asking him to stay and just letting him go. He took the choice out of her hands with a clipped “I’ll have my stuff out by Tuesday.” He tried not to look back as he stalked off toward the door, but he turned, just for a moment, and caught a glimpse of her solemn face right before the door closed.

He jogged down the steps and onto the street before either of them could change their minds about leaving it there and go back, still reeling and confused and angry and hurt. Rodney wasn’t the walking type, generally preferred to stay in one place and do something productive rather than idly waste his time walking without purpose.

This time, it seemed like the right thing to do, and the cool air felt good against his face, still overheated from the fight. He didn’t know what he was going to do. Trying to find an apartment in California in two weeks was like searching for an English major with a brain. It just couldn’t be done. He could stay in a motel until Jennifer left, and then there was another week on the lease after that, but he didn’t want to move back into that apartment for such a short time, especially considering it would probably still smell like her, and Rodney didn’t think he could handle that, knowing she was gone and halfway across the world when he could still feel her presence everywhere.

He could probably stay with Jeannie if he needed too. He hadn’t managed to see Theodore yet, the month since he’d been born had been so impossibly hectic that he couldn’t spare even a weekend. He kept calling to tell them he’d try to get out there as soon as possible, because the last time he hadn’t shown up when he promised, it’d been Mom’s funeral, and Jeannie had stayed pissed at him for months after that.

To be fair, he’d been stranded on an alien world at the time, millions of light years from Canada, but of course he couldn’t tell Jeannie that a secret government organization seemed to think that part of the introductory tour was a ‘quick trip off-world, just to get a taste for it’ and they’d wound up bound, gagged, and thrown in some mud-brick jail cell because someone had sneezed.

She’d mostly forgiven him by now, especially after Theodore was born, but Rodney was pretty sure that was because she’d been so sleep-deprived and distracted that holding a grudge was just too much to take on. He didn’t know what to do about work, because he couldn’t continue his research at Berkeley from Canada, and while the SGC kept calling him weekly to ask him if he could start, immediately, he wasn’t sure they’d be willing to use their top-secret beaming technology for a faster commute. He could always quit Berkeley, stay up in Canada while he looked for a place in Colorado, and hope that the SGC still wanted him by the time he found somewhere, but it wasn’t his most ideal option. It would have to do.

He was about to flip open his phone and dial Jeannie, hoping it wasn’t too late wherever they were staying this time, and ask if he could ‘see Theodore’ for a couple of weeks when his phone rang. He stared at it for a second, confused, because normally one had to dial first before the phone rang, and it usually didn’t ring his own phone, and—

Oh, right.

He fumbled around with his phone for a moment, thinking about how whoever was calling had the worst fucking timing. He was busy, thank you, trying to find a place to live and figure out the right words to say to his sister so that she didn’t blow up at him, as she was so prone to do lately, for calling late and trying to use her house like a hotel. He had enough on his hands without some damn mystery caller.

He thumbed the talk button, pressed the phone to his ear, and snapped “What?”


	7. The Turn

John got the call on a foggy Monday morning in May, right after the last of the snow had faded from the mountaintops and spring was giving way to summer.

By Tuesday morning, he was in New York, stumbling along rain-slick sidewalks, looking for the number of a building manically, like it was the last thing he ever had to do, and maybe it would be.

Something like relief, but darker, more twisted, rippled through his body when he found the right place; rode the elevator up sixteen floors and wandered around identical hallways until someone’s secretary decided it would be best to ask his name and direct him to the proper office room.

Everything was beige and chrome, a combination which was never that attractive to begin with, but John was probably going to hate for the rest of his life anyway, simply for the associations. There was an older man in a suit waiting at the only desk in the office with a grim look on his face, and John wondered it the man’s face always looked like that because he spent his days doing this kind of horrible work.

“Major John Sheppard, I presume?” He asked, looking up over rimless glasses and studying John in judgment, as if it were really his place to comment on the ratty jeans and Led Zeppelin T-shirt that he’d forgotten to change out of in his haste to get here.

“It’s just John,” He corrected automatically, then clarified “I’m not in the Air Force anymore.” The lawyer—he was a lawyer, right?—didn’t ask why, but again, that wasn’t really his place.

“Stephen Crawford,” he introduced himself, simply nodding for John to sit down in the chair across from his desk and waited a moment before continuing. “You received the fax I sent you? With the will?”

“Yes,” John answered, his throat raw and dry for reasons even he couldn’t discern. He’d been a frantic mess, running into town to find someone with a fax machine when half the town was still asleep, had finally watched as the sheets of paper slid into the bottom of the fax machine, and he’d picked them up while they were still hot with shaking hands, still oblivious to any questions or concerns about his health.

“Then you are aware that Mr. Sheppard appointed you as his executor. Are you willing to carry out this duty?” Crawford’s voice was cool and professional, and it sent chills up John’s spine, like maybe he was just a little too automated to be human.

“Y-yes,” He stuttered out, pale and a little shaky, still not entirely sure what he was doing here or when he was going to wake up. Crawford didn’t seem concerned with John’s state of being, or much of anything, really. He’d been told, briefly, that this guy was to help him manage all the aspects of his brother’s will, and then he’d been too busy trying to find a flight to really think much beyond that.

“Um,” John stopped, gathered his wits before he said something else incomprehensible and proved himself even more of a mess. “Do you know what happened? They just said there was an accident, they didn’t clarify…” John trailed off, wondering if this guy even knew the details. He was just the lawyer, for all John knew, he’d never even met John’s brother.

“I was told,” Crawford drawled slowly, professionally, seeming a little fed up and tired with how out of it John was, but he had no right to an opinion, unless he’d just lost his damn brother. “That Mr. and Mrs. Sheppard were out celebrating her most recent political success, I’m sure you’ve heard?”

John blinked, trying to scour his brain for any shred of information regarding what Jeannie had been doing in Canada. Crawford seemed exasperated and slow, hardly noticing the way John’s hands clenched into fists when he paused for even one second too long. “She secured the investments of a few major corporations for an underdog Canadian candidate. She may have single-handedly determined the outcome of the next election. It was a rather…sly move,” he commented, glancing at John with narrow eyes and an unreadable expression.

“I really don’t care,” John gritted out, redirecting him back to “What happened to my brother?”

Crawford sighed, seeming put-off by John’s lack of interest in his sister-in-law’s political accomplishments. “They were returning home when a truck driver fell asleep at the wheel and failed to stop at a red light. It was a side hit and they were in a convertible. I have been informed that they were both killed swiftly, if that helps.” He didn’t seem to think it would help any, but John didn’t have time to berate the guy for his horrible bedside manner when the word ‘both’ was bouncing around in his head like a grenade.

“Wait, they’re both dead? Jeannie too?” John’s head snapped up, eyes wide and frantic, and he hadn’t been informed of anything besides David’s death and whatever was in his will, they hadn’t told him—

“Yes,” Crawford answered quickly and left it at that.

John let out a shaky breath and ducked his head, shutting his eyes against the burning of the light and whispering “Shit.” A beat of silence passed as the world slipped out from under his feet, mind rushing through labyrinths of pain, grief, and uncertainty. “Shit.”

* * *

Rodney was numb, quiet, and didn’t have anything abrasive to say to anyone. Didn’t have much of anything to say at all, really. Those that didn’t know him thought he was usually this reserved. Those that did know him hadn’t said a word, had tried to show support through hands on shoulders and tight-lipped nods, looks of sympathy from across the room. No one had tried to speak to him.

It was best that way, really. Rodney wasn’t sure if he could keep himself together if he actually had to open his mouth. It felt like he only had so many words left to say, and if he said them all now, he’d lose them forever and wind up empty, lost. It was a ridiculous notion, and Rodney didn’t believe in such trivial things, but these words were his, and he was holding them close to the chest for now.

He’d rushed back to the apartment in a haze, gathered what he could of his stuff, putting a few changes of clothes and his necessary items into a suitcase, shoving the rest in boxes that he promised would be picked up and put into storage in the next few days. Jennifer had known, immediately, that something was wrong, but she hadn’t said a word to Rodney, and every time she’d tried, he’d shut her down, cold and uncaring.

Now was not the time for that.

The flight was a red-eye, he’d had to fly coach in a middle seat, but he was so out of it that he didn’t particularly remember much of the flight, just that he’d asked the flight attendants for as much liquor as he could keep down before they’d cut him off. He was sober again, now, and somewhat bitter about it.

The flight got in at three in the morning, and it took Rodney nearly two blocks of walking the streets of St. Catherine to realize what time it was. He stumbled into the nearest taxi, demanded that they drive him east, as far east as he needed to go, that he’d pay whatever the guy wanted.

He fell asleep in the back seat of the taxi, for the whole half hour ride out of the city. When the driver finally shouted him awake and dumped him out the moment he got his cash, Rodney was standing in front of a motel with a blinking sign that said “V CA CY” in ugly neon orange.

He got himself a room, dumped his duffel on the floor, splashed some rusty water over his face and waltzed right back out into the pale blue light of the rising sun. He didn’t have the heart to try to sleep right now, and he could wait outside the door of whatever funeral home he needed to be at around six. It wasn’t as if he had anything else pressing to do. Not with Jeannie—

Christ.

Rodney swallowed his feelings and marched on, along the sides of dusty roads, sun-worn and bleached in the light of dawn like a ghost of its former self.

It was cold in Canada for May, Rodney thought, though that very well could’ve been the fact that it was four in the morning and everything was dewy, and Rodney had forgotten a jacket because who had time to think of jackets when his sister was in a morgue somewhere, cold and pale and blue like the goddamned street and—

Rodney prided himself on the fact that he made it to the trash can next to the funeral home before he threw up all the alcohol he’d had on the plane.

He wiped at his mouth, spit a couple of times to try to rid his mouth of the awful, acidic taste, and settled down on the steps to the Algen & Sons Funeral Home, a small, family-owned business that they’d used when his father had finally washed up, overdosed on some drug or another and left unclaimed in a morgue somewhere. They’d only buried him because his mother had the media on her tail, it was during her first campaign, and it would’ve only drawn more unwanted attention to the fact that Canada’s first choice for Prime Minister had hooked up with a flaky asshole in her wilder days, popped out a couple of kids, and then let the guy run off with his newest Bimbo of the Week and whatever drugs he could get his hands on.

His mother had always said that the pressure of being the future Prime Minister’s husband was too much for him, had driven him away from their family and towards the gritty death he met in some alleyway near their townhouse. Rodney had bitterly laughed to himself in the solitude of his room, because he knew it didn’t matter what his mother’s job was, their father was a fuck-up since he’d joined the Harvard Drop-Out Club and came to Canada looking for cheap drugs and rich women.

He was shaking a little, maybe from the cold, maybe from the rush of memories pounding against his skull, but the rough concrete formed patterns on the bottom of his thighs through the jeans he was wearing, and it felt real enough that he couldn’t just rant his way out of it, talk right past the problem until they had a solution. He couldn’t fix this.

He let out an uneven laugh, crackling in the damp air that spread out around him in the humming silence of western New York, and thought about the million and one things he still had to say to Jeannie. Most of them were simple criticisms, nearly half of them insulting the life she’d chosen for herself. The publicity and politics that Rodney would never understand. The slightly quirky husband that Rodney still swore she’d married partly for the trouble it would stir up. The kids that grounded her from her job for months, slowed everything down and deepened the rings under her eyes, the lines around her mouth, and yet gave her a brightness that even Rodney could see.

When the clouds broke into a light drizzle, Rodney didn’t move, just let the dampness cling to him like a cold blanket, shielding him from everything in the outside world he didn’t want to face, childishly thinking that if he stayed hidden long enough, the thunder and the lightning wouldn’t be real anymore, and he wouldn’t be scared. So fucking scared.

* * *

There were two separate services in two separate cities: David’s was just outside Buffalo, far enough from Wall Street to weed out the businessmen and close enough to their childhood home to draw some of David’s real friends. Jeannie’s was in Fort Erie, near one of the south beaches where they’d had property before, and a strange enough area to keep away the thousands of sycophants that thought Jeannie a saint; Rodney didn’t want creepy people at his sister’s wake.

They were near enough to each other that the people who really mattered could attend both.

Rodney had calmed down some after he’d talked to the funeral director and learned that Jeannie had already planned out most of everything, he just had to give the okay. He was still quiet, but his frequent eye-rolling was back and he occasionally forgot his grief long enough to chew someone out for being moronic until he caught himself, fumbling and surprised every time, not sure who he was supposed to be anymore.

* * *

John had resorted to the tried-and-true method of stoicism, ignoring it until it went away. He’d convinced himself that if he didn’t pay any attention to the grief or cold fear scrabbling for purchase at the base of his neck, then eventually, it would give up and just go away. He reasoned that him and David hadn’t even been that close—they’d only just recently started talking to each other, it wasn’t as if they were the closest of brothers.

* * *

To each these men, this was enough for now. And maybe it would have been for a long time after, but something that felt an awful lot like fate—which Rodney still staunchly refused to believe in—was pulling them together, slowly but surely, like the oceans to the moon. A constant, inevitable force, invisible but always there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> End of Part I.


	8. An Interesting Day

They met at David Sheppard’s service, but were never formally introduced. There was too much commotion in the room, too many people crying or fighting or trying to wheedle others out of their shares in the company. John had tried, really tried, to keep this service personal, private; but it seemed that his brother’s Wall Street ‘friends’, at least the ones that mattered enough to come this far, didn’t particularly care where the setting was, they were still businessmen at heart.

John spent most of his time either avoiding everyone like the plague, because everyone seemed to think that he needed a shoulder to cry on, or getting in between David’s sleazy colleagues before they wound up shouting because they were drunk and pissed that they couldn’t capitalize on David’s death by buying out the company. John was, technically, in charge of the entire thing as the sole majority shareholder, but he’d kept that mostly under wraps for now, and intended to siphon it all off until they left him alone. He hadn’t needed his father’s money to survive, he certainly didn’t need his dead brother’s.

The wake passed in a blur of motion, and John was fairly sure he’d said hello to everyone at least twice, but he couldn’t remember a single name. He recognized a few people, vaguely, from pictures or simply by description, but he’d never been a big enough part of David’s life to take note of any of his friends or colleagues.

John hated funerals, anyway. He’d went along with David’s wishes and asked for a priest to be in attendance, do certain readings, comfort the bereaved—well, anyone besides him, really—and talk about God and heaven and legacy like it meant something. Maybe to David, it did, but John spent most of his time squirming awkwardly in his seat, planning escape routes in case Father Jacob decided he simply had to have a talk with the brother of the deceased.

When people started filtering out, it was like a breath of fresh air. He’d decided to have David cremated, partly because John had always gotten the feeling that David didn’t really want to wind up in a casket in the family plot, forever rotting away next to his father, but mostly because the thought of having his dead body pumped with chemicals and made-up creeped John out. He’d seen too many body blown up beyond recognition, too many people lost in the desert, shot down and bled out, that the formality of caskets and embalming seemed unfit, somehow.

He’d hardly remembered to grab his passport before leaving, had never needed it before, in all the war zones he’d been it. They seemed like such a trivial thing, passports, when he’d flown planes illegally over borders too many times to count, all at the orders of the military.

Jeannie’s service was near the lake, at some small but open funeral home, and John was still trying to pick out the things that signified this really was Canada. So far, it all looked the same as New York had, but with slightly stranger street names.

The building was under lock and key, with a bouncer—there was really no other word for it, in John’s mind—standing at the door with a list in hand. He thought it strange that such strict security was needed for a wake, but David had mentioned something about Jeannie being some kind of celebrity, sort of, and he had to admit that the group of slightly-older-than-teenagers huddled near the side of the building was unnerving.

He was early, hadn’t intended to be, but didn’t have anywhere else to be and if he’d waited any longer, he might’ve been able to convince himself that he didn’t belong here, after all. He hadn’t known Jeannie that well, per se, had only met her a handful of times, but she’d always been warm and welcoming to him, understanding of all the unspoken things between David and him, and he felt like he owed her.

He hadn’t realized it, at first, but she’d changed David. Given him a different kind of perspective, brought him back down to earth before he made the same mistake their father had after their mother died. She’d given him something more important to concentrate on, besides his work. Their family, the way she so gracefully held everything together, had stopped David from running away with the company, turning into one of those corporate sharks without a personal life.

He owed her for that, he supposed. He doubted David would’ve given him the time of day if she hadn’t swept in and made him realize the importance of family.

John didn’t know how to approach the guard at the door, and he debated over it before just deciding to walk in like the guard wasn’t there, maybe he was important enough to be recognized.

But the guy stuck his arm out, asked politely but gruffly “Name?” and John had tried to answer as clearly as he could, wondering where this list had come from and if he was actually on it.

“John Sheppard,” he replied, and was about to attempt an explanation at how he knew Jeannie, but the guard shushed him with a hand held up like a gate as his eyes flicked down the list.

“Sorry, you’re not here,” the guard said calmly, eyeing John as if he were trying to judge what his intentions were. John sighed because it figured something like this would happen to him. Try to do the right thing and wind up sadly mistaken in every capacity. It almost felt like the world was telling him that he shouldn’t be here, he didn’t have a place in Jeannie’s life so he didn’t need to attend her funeral, but that was just a bit too melodramatic for him.

“Look,” he started calmly, and was almost surprised that he wasn’t angry. It wasn’t like the world would crash down if he couldn’t get in to wander around with a bunch of his dead brother’s dead wife’s family, most of which he hardly even knew, but he’d feel guilty if he didn’t at least try. It felt like the right thing to do—pay his final respects to the woman that had meant the world to David. “I was Jeannie’s brother-in-law.” He wondered if that term could still apply, considering his brother had died, as well, so the one thing connecting them was gone.

The guard didn’t seem particularly pissed off or suspicious of John, but he was a professional. “I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to let anyone in but those on this list. It’s my job.”

John fought the urge to roll his eyes. This guy was honor-bound and didn’t want to be fired by accidentally letting someone crazy in—really, how many fans did his sister-in-law have?—and John could understand that. Hassling him was just going to make them both miserable, and at this point, John couldn’t really afford to have any more misery in his life.

“Okay,” John said quickly, rubbing at the back of his neck unconsciously. “Is there any way I could—I don’t know, talk to someone that might recognize me?”

The guy started shaking his head, and John abruptly noticed how young he was, but then a figure appeared in the shade of the front hall and squinted out into the brightness surrounding John, and John tilted his head to watch.

“Who’re you?” The guy demanded, promptly stepping forward and still studying John’s features as if he were looking for something, but he didn’t know what. “I thought I told you to keep the crazy ones away,” he snapped at the bouncer guy, and yeah, John could see why this guy was so intimidated and intent on following the rules.

John just rolled his eyes, stated “I’m not crazy.”

“That’s what they all say,” The guy shot back, his attention back on John now as he squinted, and John couldn’t tell if it was because of the light or because he was trying to be obvious about his scrutiny and judgment.

John slapped on his charmer face and stuck out his hand, going for the oblivious-to-the-situation look. “John Sheppard,” he introduced himself, and the guy was halfway through spouting off line about how much he really did not care when he stopped and jerked back, then forward, looking John over again.

He still looked like he was seeing a ghost, so John quietly added “I’m Dave’s brother.” He felt something ping in his chest when he realized he didn’t know whether to use the present tense or the past tense—he was still David’s brother, but David wasn’t here anymore, and John pushed the thought away because asking someone he’d just met if dead people could have brothers was a surefire way to label himself as ‘crazy’.

“Oh,” the guy said, blinking into realization. “You.” As if he knew John, or had heard of him but didn’t particularly like him, and John had no idea what David or Jeannie had told this guy—the other brother-in-law—about him, but he couldn’t blame them when they were dead, so he dropped it.

He waved a careless hand at the bouncer, who visibly relaxed against the railing, and John stepped into the cool shade of the house and glanced around. It was a small funeral home, the type where the family that ran it more than likely lived upstairs, with the way the stairs were sectioned off, but everything seemed professional and elegant.

The guy that had let him in—John had sort of recognized him from pictures, but couldn’t recall his name as anything more than “Jeannie’s brother”—had disappeared, though there were only two rooms to disappear into.

There were a few people already there, but John was half convinced they were workers for the funeral home, because they were dressed nicely but stood formally to the side, and didn’t look at all concerned or upset. There were pictures everywhere, most of them from the later years, with David and the kids, but a few from her youth as well. John tried not to look too closely—he felt like he was intruding on her life. She hadn’t told him that much about herself when she’d been alive, it didn’t seem fair to her memory to get to know her now.

John was relieved to see that there was no casket, just some sort of low table for people to place gifts or belongings, decorated with flowers, all in white.

Everything seemed delicate, almost fragile, and John hovered in the middle of the room, not quite sure where to place himself. He didn’t know any of Jeannie’s family besides David, and he hated funerals enough as it was. He didn’t need the added discomfort of feeling misplaced and left out, but he only managed to get through the door on sheer luck, so hell if he was leaving now.

He wandered around the empty room for a moment, trying to see if there were other rooms or anything more entertaining than a bathroom with funky-shaped faucets—he’d been to a funeral home once with an entire game center upstairs, and he didn’t care that he spent most of his time playing with ten-year-olds—but it was a tiny place and he ran out of doors to go through. He checked with the bouncer guy to ensure he’d be let back in if he went out, and the guy nodded as he passed into the cooler air and started wishing he smoked so he’d have a reason to lean against the wall.

He was still trying to figure out if it’d set in yet, the fact that David was dead, but it wasn’t that much different from all those years they hadn’t been talking, except maybe this time there was less anger and more sadness. It left a bitter taste in his mouth, and he tried to shake the feeling but it never quite left.

John gazed into space as people started filtering in, first slowly and then all at once, clumping around the front door and waiting for the security guy—John thought he heard his name was Ford—to let them through. John chewed on his lower lip, felt out-of-place without his dress uniform on, tried to pretend he recognized the hoards of people filtering through the door.

At some point, he ventured back inside, where the air was suddenly much warmer and full of noise. There were children running around between people’s legs like pinballs, people talking in hushed tones and some crying, most of them holding glasses of champaign or hors d'œuvres like ties to reality.

There was someone—not a priest, but someone official-looking—that went through the service, pausing for a few select people to say things, and John noted that he didn’t find the other brother-in-law up there among the rest of grievers. In fact, he didn’t see him in the room at all.

Another bout of crying and beautified words, then people were back to milling about and hugging and talking about Jeannie’s life and accomplishments. John kept tugging on his collar, felt like he was suffocating, and when someone tried to cling to him in a fit of self-induced grief, he fled like a skittish hare, passing by Ford so quickly he jumped.

John wasn’t the type to set all his emotions out on the table and splatter his grief all over everyone else—he was going by the time-honored method of ignoring it until it went away. It had yet to fail him.

The brochures he’d hidden behind before had boasted about the beach-side location of the funeral home, and right about now the open water seemed to be exactly what he needed, so he headed towards the sound of the waves and the smell of salt on the air, winding down a short path that led through the trees onto a tiny patch of beach.

The water stretched out before him, ghosting on the horizon, and John took a deep breath, in and out, closing his eyes against the cool sting of the wind and walking towards the water. It was still freezing—all the Great Lakes stayed cool until at least mid-July, and it’d been a colder May than usual this year. Plus, this was Canada, land of ice.

John hadn’t paid attention to the crunch his shoes made against the shells and bits of wood scattered in the sand, but it had apparently alerted someone to his presence, and a figure to John’s right, hidden by tall grass, stepped out and started yelling.

“I thought I made it abundantly clear to that imbecile of a guard that no one was allowed down here! Does anyone understand English anymore? Ou êtes-vous un crétin qui ne peuvent pas parler anglais? When the official languages of Canada are French and English, you would think to learn the both of them! It’s common sen—Oh, it’s you.” He abruptly cut off, staring at John with quick, assessing eyes.

John shifted under his gaze, not entirely sure how to confront the only other person in this entire ordeal that might have something of an idea why John was so fucked-up about this when he hadn’t even remembered David’s birthday, or flown out when his son was born.

“Hi,” John replied a little slowly, a little stupid, like he wanted to be assumed an idiot and told to leave because he wasn’t sure he wanted to spend another moment on a beach with this man he’d never met before.

“Yes, hi, hello, how are you, et cetera, et cetera, let’s just move past the pleasantries, shall we? Funerals are bullshit, dead siblings suck, and this beach is disgusting and probably full of thousands of seaweed parasites that are going to give me the death flu and bring about my early demise.”

John didn’t quite know how to keep up with that, so he just stepped a little closer and looked down at the sand. He had to agree, the beach did seem disused and a little unclean, but it was still too early for the swimming season, and the sun hadn’t quite warmed up to the idea of summer. Jeannie’s brother didn’t seem like the kind of guy that needed a verbal response to continue talking, so John shoved his hands in the stiff pockets of his suit pants and set his gaze on the line between the ocean and the sky.

They stood in silence for an extended moment, wind whipping a little meanly around them, like it was trying to get a rise out of them for the hell of it. It had been raining all over the area for the past few days, on-and-off drizzles, never a full-blown storm that passed swiftly. Everything seemed to be teasing, just rippling the surface but never plunging in, so close to too much, or maybe just enough.

It pissed John off, but then again, a lot of things had been doing that recently.

“You’d think all those morons in there would clear out with the threat of violent storms rolling in from the lake, fair-weather wake attendees or what-not, it’s not as if any of them actually knew Jeannie. Or maybe they did, it’s not as if it matters, they need to clear out already so this completely pointless fiasco can be over with.”

John shrugged, lightly and unassuming. “Some people need funerals,” he said simply. The added to say goodbye was left unsaid, but he was fairly sure they both understood. Jeannie’s brother seemed like a smart guy behind all that abrasiveness.

He scoffed, though, waved a hand in some sort of gesture that could mean anything, and ranted on. “It’s all just a façade. An excuse to get drunk and get a little weepy, waxing lyrical about someone they hardly knew because the dead can’t speak for themselves and tell them to shove it up their arses, which Jeannie would very well be doing right now, except—well, maybe not, seeing as she’s a politician at heart and—Christ, I’m going to have to start saying ‘was’ now, won’t I?” He abruptly shut his mouth, pressing his lips into a thin, whited-out line and keeping his eyes open and focused on the sea as if it held some sort of mystery.

It was then that John understood; he talked and ranted to cover up what he was feeling, keep himself from saying the things that were actually on his mind, distract himself. John got it, and he wasn’t going to press. As far as he was concerned, his method was no worse than John’s, which mostly consisted of saying nothing at all, letting it all swirl around in his mind and hope it would eventually find its way out through his ears.

He continued talking after he recovered from that little shock, pulled himself back and started insulting the town they were in, the people from the town and from the wake, the weather, and as far as John could tell, anything else the man had ever had a problem with. He didn’t mind, strangely enough, because he couldn’t remember ever tolerating people that talked too much or too loudly, or people with too many opinions. But the constancy of it was soothing, a lilting rhythm jarring against the steady rush of the waves, and it took John’s thoughts away from where he was and what he was doing there. It was a nice relief.

At some point, voices filtered down from the funeral home behind them, and if John squinted through the evergreens and newly leafed-out trees, he saw figures dressed in black walking out of the door in groups, more when the first hints of thunder started to sound through the clouds. Jeannie’s brother kept speaking through it all, until most of the guests were gone and the sky was threatening to start raining at any moment. John’s slight cough and nod over his shoulder got them traipsing back up through the pine-needle trail, hanging back as one last group of grievers headed out.

The people from the funeral home were already cleaning up when they got in, and if it had been anyone but them, there might have been some sort of outrage that they were throwing the photo displays in a pile on the floor and leaving the flowers up for whatever other service they seemed to be preparing for. Jeannie’s brother walked in, took a look around the place and huffed in something akin to approval at their speed, then waltzed across the room to pick up the urn that John had assumed held Jeannie’s ashes.

He wasn’t quite sure why the urn needed to be displayed, but as Jeannie’s brother fumbled around with it and managed to shove the thing into a backpack left by the staircase, he wasn’t particularly concerned with whether or not people talked to the urn, as creepy as that was.

John was pinpointed by two eyes suddenly, and then Jeannie’s brother was staring at him a little strangely, eyes narrowing after a few seconds, before he said quickly “You said you name, I don’t remember what it was.”

It was, apparently, a question disguised as a vaguely insulting statement, and John took a moment to figure that out before replying “John Sheppard” and sticking his hand out.

Jeannie’s brother looked at his hand like he had no idea what John was doing with it, then waved his own hand around in the air and replied curtly “I don’t do this,” another hand gesture, “this…social thing, with the introductions and whatnot, apparently it’s something I need to work on. Anyway, Dr. Rodney McKay, no, I am not a medical doctor and I don’t care about your weird rash, I just want to know what you’re doing with Dave—with your brother’s ashes.” He blinked at John with owl-eyes and the bluntness and honesty of someone that didn’t quite understand social boundaries.

John was a little taken aback by the question, mostly because he hadn’t thought about it. They’d handed him a plastic bag full of what they told him was his brother, gave him a pat on the shoulder and sent him on his way. Dave’s ashes were currently sitting in the passenger seat of his car, still in the plastic bag they came in, threatening to slide off the seat with every sharp turn or quick stop.

He had no idea what he was going to do with them. They’d kind of been haunting him from the corner of his eye since he got them, and it’d been enough of a fumbling mess to explain to border control that the bag of questionable powdery material was actually his brother, and could they please not open the bag because John didn’t have another zip lock or even a twist tie, and no, he didn’t have an urn, did he need and urn to be allowed to enter Canada legally? Christ.

“Um. I don’t…I haven’t thought about it,” John admitted, blinking at Rodney as if he had some sort of solution, but he was looking away and chewing on his lip nervously, his hands fiddling around each other restlessly.

“I think—” Rodney started, then stopped, looked around a bit, then made some sort of outwards gesture with both arms, dropping quickly in defeat with a sigh, saying “I don’t believe in all this spiritual mumbo-jumbo, it’s ridiculous to think there’s some invisible man hanging out in a part of space that hasn’t been thoroughly scanned or explored, no offense to your religion if you happen to have one, but Jeannie—” He paused, shifted his weight between his feet, and wouldn’t meet John’s eyes. “Jeannie sort of liked the possibility that maybe—” he seemed to reconsider his words, then repeated with a bit more finality “Maybe. And if she thought there might be, even if there isn’t, I just—” He looked up then, and John found he couldn’t quite remember what breathing felt like with that blue, open and honest, staring right into him like that. “I think she’d want to be with Dave. Not just in never-never-land or whatnot, but. Her ashes. With Dave’s. If that’d be okay by you.”

John was surprised by how unsure of himself Rodney seemed, considering John got the impression he was generally very confident, if a little arrogant. It didn’t take much for John to agree; hopefully Rodney had somewhere in mind, somewhere that meant something to Dave and Jeannie, because John was worried he didn’t know David well enough to know where he would’ve wanted his ashes spread. “Sure, yeah,” John replied, a little absently, and Rodney blinked away his uncomfortableness in a moment and was back to blustering around words.

“Well, alright, then. I—Yes, okay, that was… Anyway, I’m not in any rush, it’s not as if I have—never mind.” Rodney fluttered around with his bag, stepping towards and away from the door like he was doing an interpretive dance inspired by a timid flamingo. John found it a little amusing to watch, and the corners of his mouth tugged away from him, against his will.

He stopped Rodney before he spun himself into a hole he couldn’t get out of, cutting him off with “I’m hungry.”

Rodney blinked three times—John counted because he was somewhat bored and in one of those moods—and sharply replied “Yes, how astute of you, you’ve recognized one of your basest human instincts. Or perhaps it would be best to consider you Neanderthal, considering—”

John rolled his eyes, something he’d rarely had the chance to do since he’d entered the Air Force, and stopped Rodney again with “I figured we could grab lunch. Talk about…stuff.” John wasn’t usually this articulate, but death brings out strange things in people, and John figured something about David’s death was making him want to connect with this complete stranger that happened to be family, according to the books.

“Stuff?” Rodney prodded skeptically. John could tell, somehow, that he was about to launch into another insulting tirade, likely taking shots at John’s education, social skills, stereotypical quiet guy persona, or all of the above. John didn’t think of himself as the typical guy, but he figured most guys probably thought themselves special, so he wouldn’t have called Rodney on it anyway. He still wanted to stop him.

“About where we’re dumping the ashes,” John explained, wincing inwardly at his use of the word “dumping” instead of something a bit more politically correct, but Rodney didn’t seem to notice, so maybe he wasn’t as sensitive as everyone else had been when John had tried talking about his dead brother. Most of what he had to say consisted of “He’s dead.” and “I don’t know, he was kind of an ass.”

“Oh, right,” Rodney rebounded, and then he was hauling his bag over his shoulder and leading the way out the door, talking somewhat animatedly about the shitty weather with fake enthusiasm painted on so thick that John almost believed it. He didn’t seem to have a filter for his mind—one minute, he was bitching about the rain and ducking back under the cover of the porch, the next he was asking if John had some sort of working car that wasn’t from halfway across the world and could handle a bit of Canadian rain. Apparently, Rodney had a rental and it was nowhere near up to his standards.

John shrugged and led the disgruntled man to the truck he’d rented, a beaten-up Chevy Impala with more than a few years under its belt, and Rodney had a few harsh words to say about American-made cars, but the rain picked up and he didn’t seem to have a problem with ducking inside the passenger side door and shutting it so quickly he almost caught his fingers in it.

John got the feeling he would be laughing at this guy if he weren’t just a little bit fucked up from his brother’s death. He was currently attempting to find the right words to tell Rodney that the hard, lumpy thing he was complaining about sitting on was his dead brother-in-law, but he seemed to figure it out 0.3 seconds after he managed to pull the bag out from under him, and his face paled against the slate grey rain on the windows.

John felt the quirk of a smile, turned the keys in the ignition, and started driving in the direction of a diner that had “somewhat tolerable” food and broke “less than the average number of health code violations.” And they never served lemon slices with the water. John wasn’t sure why that was important, but it seemed to mean a great deal to McKay, as he kept referring to them as “death slices”.

It was going to be an interesting day.


	9. Chapter 9

Rodney didn’t understand Sheppard.

It was something of an anomaly, really, because Rodney understood everything because he was the smartest man in the galaxy, and while women and marmosets generally tended to confuse him, they didn’t completely baffle him after he’d spent a good few hours working through their logic of thinking. He could figure them out, given enough time.

So far, Sheppard had completely eluded any sort of judgments Rodney had started to make, and he couldn’t tell if it was on purpose or just some strange stroke of luck that every time Rodney thought he had the guy pegged, Sheppard did something to throw him back off balance. What really got on his nerves was the way Sheppard managed to do it all without saying much of anything.

It may have been driving him a little crazy, to be honest, which was probably why Rodney wound up squinting at Sheppard from across the laminated tabletop, finally resorting to blatant study in order to properly categorize him, because the way he kept bouncing around like a damn pinball was giving Rodney a headache, and he had enough of those to deal with already.

“What are you doing?” Sheppard asked, around a mouthful of burger, shattering yet another assumption. Rodney squinted a little more obviously, lacing his fingers under his chin dramatically, trying to pretend like he was actually interested in his food. It was rare that restaurants actually understood the “no lemon” thing on the first try, but something about the mood of this entire day was throwing off his appetite, and that never happened, so he was a little worried.

“Nothing,” Rodney lied, because he didn’t trust Sheppard enough to admit that he was thrown off by everything about the man. He was sure the feeling would pass, eventually, whether or not he managed to peg Sheppard, so he gave a distracting hand wave and started talking about the food again, because it was a safe topic. “You would think, with the vast number of food allergies, more restaurants would get things right, but no. You have to drive to the middle of nowhere in Canada to some mildly sketchy diner just to get wait staff that listen and kitchen staff that don’t try to poison you because you insult their sandwiches or something equally ridiculous.”

“Is that why you’re freaking out?” Sheppard asked, pausing with his burger raised partly to his mouth, staring at Rodney over it and seemingly unconcerned with his startling lack of manners. Rodney had thought, originally, that the brother of David Sheppard would have grown up in the same sort of high class, wealthy society. But no, apparently, John Sheppard was raised by wolves. Or monkeys. Rodney was always convinced that David had some sort of link to them.

“I would hardly consider a deadly allergy to citrus ‘freaking out’. It’s not freaking out when my life is at stake, it’s diligence, and you’d be surprised how many times that can happen, given the incompetency of most wait staff to listen or use their brains. It’s a miracle I’m not already dead!” Rodney gave his sandwich a deadly poke with his fork, wondering if he could manage to keep down a few fries if he didn’t think about anything too much. He hadn’t eaten all day, or much yesterday, which was extremely bad for his hypoglycemia, but he’d been sucking down coffee and lifesavers in the hopes it would last him until he didn’t have his dead sister following him around in a jar.

“Anyway,” he said shortly, dropping his fork because his food was a lost cause, “You have an idea for where to scatter the ashes?” He pinned Sheppard with a demanding glare, hoping to startle him into blurting out a random place so he could quickly agree and get this over with. No disrespect to Jeannie, but Rodney wasn’t a big fan of dead things, even when they were his sister. Probably even more when they were his sister.

Sheppard shrugged, talking around food again, “Not really. I didn’t know Dave that well, and I only saw Jeannie twice.”

Rodney resisted the urge to roll his eyes, because Jennifer had told him that it aggravated people unnecessarily. He’d argued, at the time, that it was plenty necessary if they were being morons, but then she’d just rolled her eyes and him and said he was missing the point.

“Well, it’s not as if I have any ideas. That was the point of dragging you here,” Rodney gulped down the last half of his water and glared at the waitress’ back until she came around to refill it. He kept his eye trained on the water pitcher for signs of poison, but apparently this diner didn’t like lemons.

Sheppard quirked an eyebrow, something like incredulity on his face, and Rodney realized it might be slightly…uncouth of him to speak in such a condescending manner, but Jennifer wasn’t here to tell him off anymore, and he didn’t need anyone else around trying to change him when he didn’t need it. He just wanted to take care of Jeannie’s ashes, get back to California, and work out what the hell he was supposed to do with his life. He was technically, at the moment, homeless. At least, if Jennifer listened when he told her to go ahead and sell the place already, he had better things to do.

“So then…what?” Rodney prompted, directing his eyes back to Sheppard and trying not to pick out the similarities between his brother and him at every gesture. He’d been having difficulty with that. They didn’t look similar enough to pass for twins, but he didn’t think anyone could miss the fact that they were siblings. Give John a shave and slap a suit and some hair gel on him and you’d have a carbon copy close enough to fool common acquaintances.

Sheppard shrugged, took another bite from his burger, and Rodney’s annoyance ratcheted up another notch with how completely unconcerned and unassuming he was. John was definitely not like his brother, overly concerned with rules and appearances. He was still reeling from the fact that Jeannie married someone like David, but she must’ve seen something he hadn’t in the man. He’d probably never know what it was.

Sheppard shrugged, delayed, and his eyes darted around to fixate on anything that wasn’t Rodney. It was grating on his nerves, playing this guessing game with a man he hardly knew and didn’t particularly want to form a connection with, especially with greater things to worry about than some sort-of in-law that he’d never met and would probably never see again.

“Look, I would really just like to get this over with, seeing as I have a lot of personal matters to deal with at the moment, and Jeannie’s death came at an extremely unfortunate time, not that it’s a problem, she was my sister, I didn’t want—but anyway, it’s imperative that I get this over with so that I can try to get back to my life before it falls apart in my absence, and if you really don’t care then—”

“Nrrgrrrah fhhls,” Sheppard interrupted, around a mouthful of burger which Rodney found to be absolutely repulsive, but he’d heard that David’s brother had been a military man, and it fit with what he was seeing. Rodney had always figured being trapped in a desert with a bunch of men in close quarters and no running water killed any shred of common-courtesy hygiene. At least the Canadian armed forces tended to carry a bit more dignity, though he couldn’t say for certain.

“What?” He snapped just as Sheppard swallowed, a hint of a cocky grin at the corner of his lips.

“Niagara Falls,” He repeated, and Rodney kept staring so as to prompt some sort of further response. It was like a game, you couldn’t say too much ofr you wouldn’t get an answer, but you couldn’t say too little or he might think the conversation was over.

Rodney hated games.

His silent question must’ve gotten through, though, because Sheppard went on, somewhat impishly, and Rodney wondered if it were against the guy code to speak about anything remotely personal with anyone you weren’t intimately involved with. “I just figure,” he gave a half-hearted shrug, one shoulder hitching up for just a moment. He still wouldn’t meet Rodney’s eyes. “It’s like a mix between two countries. The U.S. and Canada. Seems a lot like Jeannie and David, if you think about it.”

Rodney, to be quite honest with himself, which he rarely was despite being such a logical man, had to admit that it made a lot more sense than anything he’d thought of. He didn’t know enough about both Jeannie and David as a couple to find a resting place that was fitting for the both of them; most of his ideas had revolved around places Jeannie liked as a kid.

This…was just on the right side of perfect, and the fact that it came from some military grunt of a brother-in-law was frankly shocking. It wasn’t the kind of thing you thought up on the spot, as much as Sheppard might’ve tried to make it seem that way. Which meant that he’d been thinking about it, in terms of the both of them and not just David’s ashes, which meant he too had considered the possibility of scattering them together. It was a logical conclusion, surely, but not the sort of logical conclusion he expected of anyone but him, and Rodney was starting to realize that maybe most of this was completely irrational.

That was why he was so flustered. He couldn’t rely on logic for this one, and he was completely lost when it came to emotions and sentimentality, which, apparently, you needed to deal with things like dead siblings. He always knew he should’ve listened to Jennifer more when she told him he needed to take lessons in compassion. Maybe it would’ve told him how to handle telling a man he hardly knew that Niagara Falls sounded perfect, and maybe express some sort of gratefulness at the thought he must’ve given it.

Instead, he got snapped out of his head with Sheppard’s slightly timid “If it’s okay. I don’t know if Jeannie—if you had someplace in the family, something—”

“No,” Rodney stopped him before he could back down and make it even harder for Rodney to accept. “No, it’s—it’s good. Jeannie would like it, she was always trying to get me to get out of the lab and see nature more, though I don’t know why. I just—” He stopped himself, trying to make this as quick and painless as possible, so maybe he could get it over and done with and attempt to find a place to live, and possibly a new job, because he didn’t think he could stay in California when everything reminded him of Jennifer. And that was still a pain not dealt with yet; he’d been putting off thinking about Jennifer and Indonesia and the apartment because Jeannie was somewhat more pressing, and he’d take any distraction he could get.

“It’s good,” he finalized, “how far is it and when can we leave? That is, if you were meaning to do it at the same time, I mean I assumed, and seeing as we really only have one decent car and the whole point of this was so that their ashes could be spread together, I mean—I—”

Rodney closed his eyes, swallowed, and tried not to notice the fact that he’d very nearly lost a little bit of himself right there, because everything was just a little too much and a little too fast, and he needed to take a breather but he didn’t want Sheppard to have a reason to bring up the fact that they’d both just lost siblings. He didn’t want to connect Jeannie with everything that was happening. He could wait, until he was safe and sound and alone somewhere before actually piecing all of it together. One step at a time. Spread the ashes. Find a place to live. Get your shit out of California. Find a new job. Bury self in aforementioned new job. Then, after a late night working and a bottle of Scotch, maybe he could find the time to connect the dots and break down.

But not now.

“It’s not too long of a drive from here,” Sheppard answered without mentioning the stupor Rodney had slipped into just there. If there was one thing about John Sheppard’s demeanor that wasn’t bothering him, it was that he didn’t seem like he wanted to have a heart-to-heart. He was the stoic type, and perfectly content to leave Rodney to his own devices without criticism of his “grieving methods” or whatever absurd notion Jennifer had been ranting on about after his mother died.

“Okay,” Rodney spoke, mouth dry and voice a little weaker than he’d hoped, but Sheppard didn’t say anything about the food he’d barely touched or the slight shake of his hands whenever he tried to take a sip of water. He was glad the funeral was over and somewhat astonished that none of the waiters had tried to kill him yet.

A valley of silence filled the space between them, and it persisted to the quick end of their meal, then the car ride to the falls, getting turned around more than once, but Rodney didn’t say anything because the silence had lodged itself in his throat and he was struggled just to breathe. Death did strange things to people, and apparently for Rodney, it meant he no longer seemed to care that Sheppard got them lost at least twice. He hoped it would end soon, before he permanently turned into this non-assuming person without an opinion. Jeannie would hate seeing him like this, and that was…well. It was enough.


	10. Chapter 10

John got the impression that McKay was usually a man of many words, often somewhat verbose and definitely abrasive. As much as that seemed to hold true for other aspects of his life, it was like the moment they left the diner, someone had a sniper trained on his head, set to shoot if he uttered a word. It was slightly unnerving, but what could he do? He hardly knew this guy, only met him by some strange, horrible twist of events, and John had plans that involved flying back to Colorado and going on a three-day bender before anyone even tried to approach him and give him their condolences. He didn’t have time to deal with his in-law’s problems.

John liked to think that David’s death wasn’t hitting him that hard, but he knew better. He’d always had an excuse before, when he lost one of his men, that it was the middle of a war and he didn’t have time to grieve. By the time he moved on, his fallen friends and comrades had been dead long enough for the pain to have faded. This was different.

This was David, the businessman, the one that was supposed to grow old and fat and rich, talking about his reckless brother that died young to his grandchildren. This was all wrong and way too much, without the easy distraction of terrorism and firefights to distract him. All he had was the house in Colorado and a whole lot of Bourbon, and he wasn’t looking forward to reconnecting with what grief felt like. He was sure he hadn’t felt it for real since his mother died, and those memories had dulled over the years.

McKay was curiously glancing over at David’s ashes repeatedly, likely trying to figure out why John treated them the way he did, leaving them in the bag and throwing them onto the passenger seat like an empty fast-food bag with the wrappers stuffed inside.

He didn’t really know why he was doing any of this. He just figured he’d dump the ashes somewhere on the way home, get it over with at some place that was just beautiful enough to make it seem more meaningful than it felt. He wanted them gone. But McKay had mentioned something about Jeannie being a little spiritual, and John knew Dave had held on to some of the beliefs their parents had practiced, so maybe this was his due, as a brother. Take a little more time out of his life for the brother he pretended not to have for twenty odd years.

Some sort of brother he was.

“I think the turn is up here,” John said to distract himself and McKay from the bag currently plopped down onto the console over the tray where people kept change for tollways. He followed the signs of brightly painted waterfalls and bold lettering, wondering if Dave had ever come here with Jeannie, or planned to take the kids one day. As much as it was overrun by tourists, it still held the kind of power that even John knew to respect. He’d been in too many close calls in the desert or Antarctica to ignore the ways nature could kill a man if it wanted to.

McKay finally broke his silence when they found a parking spot somewhere that seemed far enough away from the beaten path that they wouldn’t be disturbed. “Don’t you need some kind of permit to scatter ashes here? It must be a very common place, given its convenience and everything, but everyone can’t just keep dumping ashes in here, it would disturb the ecosystem or something.” He flapped a hand violently, shutting the car door with his body since his other arm was wrapped around the simple urn that held Jeannie’s ashes.

There must’ve been gates or tickets or something, but wherever it had been, they missed it. Likely because John ended up driving onto some sort of path that wasn’t really a road, and they wound up parking somewhere that seemed like a parking lot, but he wasn’t going to take the time to question it.

“Not that I bother with knowing things about the soft sciences like that,” McKay continued haughtily, “mumbo jumbo with animals and water sources and how humans are destroying the Earth. None of my concern, but still, some people do care about such things, and there have got to be rules and regulations and all those legal hoops to jump through to do this without breaking the law, technically, and—”

John stopped walking abruptly, turning to McKay with a his head cocked to the side and asked stoutly “Do you want to wait to get a permit?”

“Of course not,” McKay bumbled back, slightly angered but seeming a little preoccupied with matching John’s quick pace to somewhere secluded that they could do their thing. “I was just saying that maybe we should be careful not to run into anyone that would be against this sort of thing, it would only cause problems and I really don’t have time for any more problems. And—”

“Here,” John cut in, stopping just a few feet from the edge of the falls, the roaring almost deafening over their voices. The air tasted like water flavored with freshly cut plants, and the small alcove he’d found was shadowed by large trees hanging over the edge of the falls dangerously, only barely clinging to life by some strange act of nature.

“Here what?” McKay asked quickly, then stopped short near John and seemed to blink into recognition of his surroundings. “Oh, you mean…here. Yes, of course. Alright, then,” he hovered between John and the edge of the cliff, right next to the falling sheets of water. He kept glancing back towards the direction of their car, as if he wanted to get back to firmer ground, but as far as John could tell, McKay didn’t seem the type to have irrational fears.

John was waiting for his cue, because he certainly didn’t know how this was supposed to work. He’d seen a few scenes with ashes in the movies, but there was always far too much crying and anything that was said was too soap-opera for his tastes.

“Um, I don’t suppose—” McKay stopped short of a full question, filling the air with the uncertainty and weight of what they were actually here to do. It almost felt like this was some sort of tourism thing, just a quick pit stop where they wandered by to take a gander and then left to the mundanity of their normal lives. “Do we talk?” McKay asked bluntly, pinning John with eyes bluer than the water spilling down beneath them, and he hadn’t realized the color before, not like this. It felt strangely surreal, but John figured it had something to do with the way his brain had short-circuited right around the time he remembered that the growing weight in his hand was a bag filled with what was left of his brother.

John shrugged, not entirely certain his voice would work if he’d tried to talk, and hoped like hell McKay would take the wheel on this one, else he’d end up just dropping this bag and rushing back to the car.

McKay got his wits about him sooner than John, and turned away to face the edge of the cliff, guardrail steady in place but seeming quite feeble against the force of the water.

“So, um,” McKay started awkwardly, fiddling with the urn cradled in his arms like it were scalding hot. “Hey, Jeannie,” he cleared his throat. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to talk to you, or talk to some God, or just talk, but, well— You know I’m not that good at this stuff. Jen always said—well, never mind about her. She’s off galavanting around in—But that’s her, not you, you’re—Well, you’re dead. Just in case you hadn’t noticed, but maybe you can’t, because you’re dead. Sorry about that. It wasn’t my fault, you probably know that, but it’s still—Just. Sorry.” McKay paused, tilted his head down to study the urn in his hands as he abruptly stopped fiddling with it and held it still, close against himself.

“I don’t really know what to say, except that it’s moronic—no, annoying—no, it’s— I don’t like it. You dragged me all the way up to Canada again for this ridiculous funeral with people I didn’t even like and I don’t care about them. I’m going to miss you. I know you thought I’d never say it, but, well… I was kind of starting to understand why you gave up what you did for Mom, for Dave, and the kids. I always thought you could’ve been so much more than me if you tried, but… Well, maybe you were. Sorry I didn’t get that sooner, I guess. Anyway, I did all this funeral bullshit for you, so I guess we’re even, mostly. I— This—” he sighed, exasperated and seemingly exhausted, before breathing out the last few words in a huff that sounded more like a forlorn sigh. “Goodbye, I guess.”

McKay held onto the urn for a moment’s beat, then turned to John and blinked, as if expecting some sort of grand gesture. John had nothing, so he stared at McKay for a beat, then started, slowly “I think…Aren’t you supposed to actually scatter the ashes?”

McKay seemed slightly flustered by the question, but he rebounded with astounding sarcasm, “No, you’re supposed to collect them and put them up for display on your mantle so you see them every day and become obsessed with death.”

John was fairly sure this was some sort of acting out, like a toddler having a tantrum, but he didn’t call McKay on it. He was feeling a lot like throwing a fit, as well.  

McKay sighed though, forlorn and worn-out, then looked back up at John and said “I was waiting for you to say…whatever. I think we should scatter them at the same time.”

“Oh.”

Suddenly faced with the one thing he’d been hoping to avoid somehow, he stepped tentatively towards the edge, so that McKay was just hovering in the corner of his eye, close but still not a part of the small world that he felt like Dave and him were in. He stood there for a long while, unsure of what to say, before he realized that this was exactly how they had been in real life, and he laughed softly.

If that’s the way it was going to be…

“You were kind of an asshole, Dave,” John admitted honestly, and blatantly ignored McKay’s spluttering beside him. “So was I, but I guess that’s Dad’s fault, because he was an asshole, too. We—” John swallowed, and the word in his throat stuck because it was so much bigger than just a word. “After Mom died… Well, you know how it went.” John debated whether to go on, but figured a little foofaraw at this point would be tolerated, and Dave couldn’t tell him to shut up, so he was damn well going to put in his two cents.

“So Dad ran himself into an early grave, I fucked off and joined the Air Force to get away from you only to fall out of the sky, and you ended up here, a sack of ugly, grey, flaky shit that I’m half convinced is a bunch of pulverized cinderblocks.” John laughed bitterly, louder this time, clutching the bag in his hand like he could crush it into something smaller and finer than dust.

Everything about this felt ridiculous to him—the talking, the fact that his brother fit in a damn zip-lock bag, the way he was standing at the edge of Niagara Falls for the first time in his life, and the only thing he found amazing about it was the way it felt like the falls were sucking the air from his lungs so strongly that his ribs were cracking.

This was an ending, he realized. This was one of those moments in his life; the kind of moment that attached itself to every memory and every future event, transcribing it as “before Dave died” and “after Dave died” respectively.

Maybe it should have mattered more to John. Maybe he should have said more, or gotten choked up, or taken a moment of silence to soak it all in. He didn’t. He didn’t think it would change anything, anyway. Mom and Dad were dead, Dave was a bag of ash in his hands, and he was still the fuck-up of the family.

Hah, John thought. What family?

The smile that crept onto his lips was bitter, but just sincere enough that he hoped David would get it, wherever he was. If he was anywhere at all.

“We really fucked up, didn’t we?”


	11. Chapter 11

The drive out of Niagara Falls was much worse than the drive in, mainly because they weren’t driving through some sort of hiking trail illegally, but following actual, paved roads, which also tended to be flooded with cars.

Rodney kept muttering “Ridiculous” under his breath, because honestly, it was. Why should there ever be so much traffic condensed into such a small space? If they needed more room, they should’ve built more roads. Then maybe he wouldn’t have to keep tapping his fingers aimlessly, trying to avoid any sort of awkward conversation Sheppard might try to start up.

Though the idea of Sheppard starting any conversation seemed almost ludicrous, with the way he’d been staunchly silent since they’d scattered the ashes over the side of the cliff, watching them wisped away by the wind before they had time to even realize where they’d gone. Rodney didn’t like the stoic, silent type; he always found them a little creepy. For all he knew, Sheppard could be plotting the best way to murder Rodney right now. All that silence surely couldn’t bode well for one’s sanity.

And to be honest, he didn’t have time to get murdered right now. He had to get back to his hotel room and call Berkeley right away, they’d promised him his job would be safe although he’d had to leave during one of the most crucial conferences they’d had in years, and he was meant to be speaking somewhere today, but obviously there were extenuating circumstances. And then there was still that place in Colorado that refused to tell him what his job would actually consist of. There’d been aliens and wormholes and other worlds, and then a whole lot of hush-hush about any of the rather boring details.

Not to mention, he had to find a place to live. All his things were in storage, and they might very well stay there for awhile unless he found time to look for an apartment in the mess of things he had to do. Truthfully, he didn’t have time to idle around in a car with this guy, but he was afraid if he took out his cell phone, Sheppard might panic and start in on his plan to tie Rodney up and slice his body into little—

_Friday, friday, gotta get down on—_

“I’m going to kill my lab technicians! They’ll never find the bodies!” He raged. This was the absolute last time he was ever leaving his phone unattended in the lab. For weeks they’d been changing his ringtone to the most ridiculous thing they could find, as if it were somehow funny to watch him get flustered and red when he tried to explain why the words _my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard_ were echoing through a family-friendly restaurant. And now, it seems that they’d managed to find a way to set these ridiculous songs only for calls not in his address book.

Sheppard was eyeing him curiously from his spot in the driver’s seat, but kept his eyes mainly focused on the road and didn’t say a word. Rodney struggled with his pockets for a moment before whipping his phone out and flipping it open to cut out that incessant noise, and it was no wonder people found him rude and impatient, when things like this were happening to him all the time!

“What, what is it?” He snapped, wondering if this was one of his idiot technicians attempting to ensure their name was at the top of the list of people he had to use as test subjects for the particle accelerator. He’d never seen a human move at speeds faster than sound before, he was actually looking forward to it. He imagined their skin would probably peel from their bones rather quickly, before the vacuum even got a chance to boil the water on their tongue.

“Mr. Rodney McKay?” A young, timid man’s voice said on the other line, and after Rodney snapped in confirmation, he stuttered out a quick “We need to see you at the office as soon as you can make it, there are certain elements of your sister’s will that we need to dis—”

“Can’t this wait?” He replied tiredly, looking at his watch and calculating the time in California. He should’ve been back there hours ago.

“No, it can’t. I’m sorry, I—”

“Who are you, anyway?” Rodney cut him off, because the last thing he needed was more paperwork and more lawyers bitching about tiny print that he couldn’t possibly be expected to read.

“I’m from Côté & Williams LLP, we handled your sister’s estate,” the guy on the other end explained carefully.

“Yes, I know that!” Rodney replied quickly, “I’m asking who you are. You have a name, don’t you? And possibly a job title, or are you—”

“My name is Tom, sir,” he interrupted, and this guy had some balls to be cutting him off like that. Not even Rodney’s interns did that. “And I’m just the secretary. It’s my job to call you and explain that we need to arrange a meeting as soon as possible about certain elements of your sister’s will that need to be addressed immediately.”

Rodney sighed, exasperated, and resisted the urge to roll his eyes. But something about this entire day had been off for him, possibly the fact that it was the day of his sister’s wake, but Rodney felt compelled to give this kid a break and just sign the damn paperwork and get out of there. Then maybe he could get back to attempting to put his life back on track, he still hadn’t sorted anything out at Berkeley or thought about what he was going to do about an apartment, and if signing a couple forms meant the lawyers would leave him alone and he could get back to work sooner, that was fine by him.

“Fine, fine,” he relented, and the kid on the other end sighed in something like relief. “When’s the soonest I can come in? I can’t afford to wait around for days on end here, I have things to do.”

“Today, actually,” the kid said, ruffling some papers and coughing nondescriptly. “As soon as possible would be ideal.”

“Great,” Rodney said, and the sarcasm was minimal because he’d been expecting to have to fight his way in. “Wonderful. I’ll be there as soon as I can. I expect any and all paperwork I need to sign ready and waiting when I arrive, preferably at the entrance,” Rodney ranted on, and he intended to snap his phone shut while the kid on the other end, Tom or Joe or something, stumbled around through his words and what Rodney assumed were the possessions on his desk, but then Tom or Joe was speaking again, somewhat urgently, and Rodney put the phone back to his ear.

“—seem to have lost his contact information, it’s urgent.”

“Sorry, what?” Rodney snapped, grinding his teeth at having to wait, again, but he supposed it wasn’t as if he had anything else to be doing while they were driving back from the falls.

“John Sheppard,” the kid said suddenly, “we were wondering if you have his contact information, we can’t—”

Rodney didn’t give any sort of preamble or explanation, just shoved the phone next to Sheppard’s face and said, bored, “It’s for you.”

Sheppard blinked at him, took the phone, then redirected his eyes to the road and nodded along to whatever the fumbling kid on the other end was telling him. He hung up a few minutes later, without having said anything more than “Hello” and “Okay.”

Rodney quirked an eyebrow at Sheppard when he handed the phone back, and the only answer he got was a shrug and “They wanted to see me too, I guess.”

“Huh,” Rodney said distractedly, narrowing his eyes at Sheppard, trying to decipher if he was actually some sort of Russian spy getting orders to kill Rodney in his sleep, and screw everyone that had ever called him a conspiracy theorist, getting a call for someone else on your private cell phone was definitely something that would only happen around really shady people, Rodney was certain of it. He could probably devise a specific, mathematical equation to prove the likeliness of all possible outcomes of this situation, but with the way the earth was littered with morons and English majors, he doubted anyone would actually be able to understand it.

Sheppard shifted course to get them to the law firm, which was somewhere in America, and Rodney still didn’t understand why his sister had done all the legal stuff with an American law firm. Shortly after she found out she was pregnant the first time, David and her found a law firm somewhere in New York and had set up their wills, and Rodney had mostly just bitched that she should’ve gone with a Canadian law firm, but Jeannie didn’t listen to him. It hadn’t seemed like a big deal at the time, since the likelihood that they would die before they had to change their wills again was—

Sheppard made a sharp turn and their car approached border control, and Rodney swallowed heavily and concentrated on the rows of cars lining up around them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As of right now, this fic is on hiatus, pending abandonment. I've still got a good few chapters finished that I can post, and I'm hoping that if I post them veryyyyyyy slowly, I'll eventually come back to finish this monster. But I don't want to get anyone's hopes up. I've got an Avengers fic that's around 50k that needs finishing ASAP, and then there are a billion other fics I have planned that I want to work on more than this. But I have a soft spot for this story, and I've been missing SGA fics recently, so we'll see. I never wanted to be one of those authors that writes 3/4 of some epic story and never pulls through, but real life gets in the way sometimes. If anyone wants to contact me about a collab or cheerleading or beta-ing or whatever else, feel free. I'm open to ideas, and I'd rather see this fic finished than worry about whose name is on the cover, so to speak. Hopefully a miracle will occur, but I'm telling you right now that I just don't know how this is going to work out.


	12. Chapter 12

John thought it was more than a little strange that someone would call him on Rodney’s phone, but he chalked it up to the fact that this entire damn week had been completely out of the ordinary, so weirdness was to be expected. The guy on the other end had sounded nervous and new, and John wanted to tell him to calm the fuck down, because whatever it was that had his knickers in a twist was most likely the reason McKay was flailing his hands around aimlessly, seeming aggravated without any particular target.

It seemed all they had to say on the matter was that John was to report to the same place McKay was immediately, or at least as soon as possible, because there was some sort of urgent matter that couldn’t be sorted out once John was back in Colorado and McKay was back….wherever the hell he was from.

The drive was nearly silent, though at some point McKay’s restlessness prompted him to flip the radio through channels until he found a classical radio station, and the next few minutes were spent listening to Mozart’s Piano concerto No. 21. He only knew what it was because his mother had played that repetitively toward the end, telling him it reminded her of childhood summers spent in Lemon Orchards.

Border Patrol seemed to be just as pissed at McKay as he was at them, but they let him through without much of a problem, and John had half a mind to think it was pure luck with the way McKay had bitched the entire time that border patrol between Canada and the United States was pointless considering neither country had anything particularly different than the other and very few people would be hopping the border illegally looking for asylum. John just rolled his eyes and was glad he didn’t have any “suspicious powder” with him anymore. Considering he’d just dumped his brother into the falls.

Finding the law firm was enough of a challenge as it was, trying to navigate through the streets of not-quite-New-York, without McKay barking directions at him even though John was mostly sure McKay had no idea where they were, either. The building was nested halfway between a run-down alley and something that looked like a residential area, and McKay kept running his mouth until they reached the third floor, about everything from the way they labeled signs in America to the fact that an elevator really wasn’t such a hard concept, and that they’d better hope to God they didn’t go out of business with their personal injury office located on the second floor.

John fully expected to get pulled into a room to sign a few papers and then be sent free, and assumed McKay would do something similar, but the moment they stumbled into the too-quiet office, the secretary looked up and got all doe-eyed for reasons John really couldn’t figure out and then asked “Are you Major Sheppard and Doctor McKay?” and John nodded while McKay seemed a little confused as they were both herded into a small office at the end of the hall, the lone window in the corner barely letting in streamed light through the slits in the blinds.

There was no one in there, just emptiness and the sounds of their breathing, and John was starting to get impatient when the door finally clicked open, and then shut like whoever just walked in had done so without opening the door much at all. John only heard the soft tap of shoes against the grey carpeting before a rather stout man wearing a bowler hat that was decades out of place stepped behind the desk in front of them and sat down with a soft flump. John had no doubt he paid top dollar for his office chair; he seemed like the kind of man to appreciate material comforts.

McKay was twitchy and impatient beside him, tapping his foot restlessly in a manner that would’ve had the inner CO in John commanding him to stop. He stared straight ahead with a bored expression, seemingly unaffected by the weight of the plump man’s eyes on his.

“Gentleman,” the plump man said roughly, then cleared his throat and adapted to a more professional tone of voice. “I’m Mr. Glouchester, attorney at law, and there are very sensitive matters we need to discuss that—”

“If this is about my sister, why aren’t I talking to my usual lawyer? Surely he should be handling this, seeing as I’m paying him and I’ve never even met you,” McKay shot over his words, seemingly unaware of the slow rage he was no doubt bringing to a boil in the pit of Mr. Glouchester’s gut.

“Unfortunately, the matter at hand does not fall under your lawyer’s jurisdiction, and as such has been delegated to me.”

Before he’d even finished his sentence and managed to sit back in his chair, McKay was ranting again, muttering about the lunacy of a system designed entirely to cater to the lying sacks of shit that all lawyers seemed to be, at least according to McKay’s World View. John’s brother-in-law was getting more and more interesting by the minute.

“And I’m here because…?” John drawled when McKay finally paused to take a breath. Mr. Glouchester was obviously flustered by the lack of authority he seemed to hold over either of them, and John smiled inside a little when that thought finally hit him. Like he was back in his teen years, sticking it to the man in the only ways he knew how, not giving a shit about the consequences because he thought he’d had nothing to lose.

“Because,” Mr. Glouchester started slowly, after a careful breath and a few taps of his ring finger against the mahogany desk, “this matter involves both the wills of Jeannie Sheppard née McKay and David Sheppard, and while I could certainly have it in the hands of your capable lawyers, the outcome would have been…less than desirable.”

John was really starting to hate this guy, with his smooth talking and the way he kept leaning back in his chair to look down his nose at them, as if he were the principal and they were little more than trouble-making schoolchildren, and it reminded John far too much of his childhood to be something he was willing to tolerate much longer.

“Well then, now that you’ve made it quite clear that we are at your mercy, would you mind telling us what this ‘matter’ is so we can sign whatever the hell we need to sign and move—”

Before McKay could finish his latest jab at the man behind the desk, the door behind them clicked open with a whoosh, and there were a few uneven steps. John had just turned back to see what the commotion was when he found, quite suddenly, a lump of warmth crashing around his legs and falling over into his lap, and John looked down at the tiny blob of pink in his lap for a good three seconds before the earlier shriek of “Daddy!” had quite registered in his mind.

He didn’t have time to think before there was a round, tear-streaked face looking up into his and tiny, tiny hands clumping at the front of his shirt and John was about ready to choke on the heart lodged in his throat because Madison Sheppard’s two-year-old lip was trembling like there was an earthquake inside her tiny body and she barely managed another second before the sobbed “Daddy!” and buried her face in the folds of his jacket.

“Christ, kid,” John muttered softly, and brought a hand up to rest gently on her shaking back, so tiny his hand nearly spread the width.

For what it was worth, John was fairly sure he kept his composure a hell of lot better than McKay, who was looking rather like a gold fish with bulging eyes as he stared between John and the lump of sobbing pink sprawled all over his lap.

It felt like years had passed before John finally found the strength to look up at Mr. Glouchester, the bastard, who was staring over the peak of his fingertips pressed against one another and, John thought, barely suppressing his amusement.

“What— What is— I don’t— What? What?” McKay babbled beside him, and then with a calm that only a robot could maintain, Mr. Glouchester cleared his throat and recited “Surely you haven’t forgotten the matter of the children, gentlemen?”

John would’ve probably clocked the guy if he hadn’t had Madison sitting like a rock on his lap, still sniffling and mumbling nonsense words that sounded nothing like “daddy” if John listened hard enough.

“The children– I– This isn’t– Surely someone would’ve informed me when– I–” McKay, obviously unable to get a full sentence out, was easily overtaken by John, regaining his composure only by resorting to the parts of his military training he hadn’t needed to follow in years, not since Afghanistan.

“Why weren’t we informed of this sooner?”

“We didn’t think it was necessary, it was clearly written in the wills of both—”

“The will?” McKay squeaked, and then shook himself and started muttering aloud again, almost as if to himself, “Surely we couldn’t be expected to read all of that, there was so much and I was just, the flight and the funeral arrangements and—”

John tuned him out.

Yes, he’d read that part of the will. He’d read and understood it perfectly, been a little surprised that David would even consider letting John have this role, but at the time he’d read it, he’d still been under the impression that Jeannie was alive, and even after he found out, it was a rush and—

“Who’s been taking care of them? Where have they been all this time, you can’t just—” John’s rage was cut off preemptively by a tiny hum from the back of the room, obviously an adult sound, and then John twisted back to see a short but slender hispanic woman holding a baby carrier with a blanket draped over the top, shifting from foot to foot and darting her eyes between the three men in the room.

“I am sorry, I have taking care of the children. I was the nanny when the car accident happens, I does not know what else to do, I—”

“You did exactly as you were expected to do, Carmina,” Glouchester cut in politely, giving the woman a short nod and seeming to ease a bit of her worry. John took a moment to stare, because David must’ve found the best nanny in the fucking country, that she— Jesus, how many days had it been? And she just—

“Thank you,” He said earnestly, a little shocked, and Carmina blushed slightly and shifted her stance. McKay was still blubbering uselessly, so he figured it was his duty to move things forward. He turned away from Carmina, reminding himself to pay her every penny she was due since David had died. He could take it from the company funds, there was no way he was going to let a saint of a woman walk away without getting paid.

Glouchester still had that stony expression on, the one that made John want to punch his face in simply because it screamed lawyer from every angle. It was moments like these that made John miss his time in the military, where shooting someone was a perfectly acceptable thing to do under the right circumstances.

But he could still here Madison’s tiny sobs, and McKay was still uselessly shocked beside him, and he wanted to get this over and done with as soon as possible. For that to happen, he had to play this guy’s game and get everything in order so he’d have no reason to hold them here longer and prolong his amusement with their personal strife.

There had to be a catch. Some reason that both he and McKay had been called here in such a fuss, and not simply because Carmina could only do so much. There was something unusual about this little situation that had Mr. Glouchester smiling like he was, because apparently he still had some little tidbit of information for the two of them that would probably send McKay into an even crazier frenzy, and—

“Which one of us gets the kids?”

McKay stopped mouthing unvoiced words and turned to stare at John with wide eyes. Mr. Glouchester just smiled a little wider because someone had finally caught on, and he could only do so much to mask his amusement, even if his smile still carried the token trace of false sympathy for their grief.

“That, gentlemen, is why we are here.” John really didn’t like the way he folded his fingers carefully and placed them on the sleek wood of his desk. “It seems that your siblings were delayed in updating their wills to reflect a mutual agreement, and as such, they state different things. Mr. Sheppard’s will reads that you, Major Sheppard, should take the children in the event of his and his wife’s death. However, Mrs. McKay’s will—”

John glanced over at McKay when he visibly flinched at the careless attention paid to his sister’s actual name.

“—states that in the event both parents die, Dr. McKay should inherit the children. It’s obvious to me that both these wills were last amended before the couple had the children, however it still poses a problem because no more modern version of either will exists.”

Mr. Glouchester was speaking slowly, as if they were idiots, and John didn’t like to be condescended to. He straightened his back a bit and kept rubbing a soothing hand down Madison’s back, relieved to hear her finally quiet down some. Carmina was still standing at the doorway with the baby carrier Theodore was in, thankfully still asleep.

Mr. Glouchester was obviously waiting for one of them to come up with a response, as if this were a game and they were just players meant to guess at his goddamn intentions, but John didn’t have time to fight against his game and still manage to get out of here in a timely manner.

“So then it’s left to us to settle it,” John states simply, purposefully not watching as McKay perked up a bit at that, realizing what that might mean for the two of them, if only one was going to get the kids. John couldn’t speak for McKay, but he sure as hell wasn’t about to give up on his niece and nephew. Granted, he’d never asked for this, would’ve told anyone that he never wanted kids, but now that they were here and real, well… He wasn’t going to turn his back, go on with his life always knowing that there were two tiny pieces of his brother still left out there, growing up without him.

If McKay expected John to give the kids up without a fuss, he’d better be prepared for a fight.

Unfortunately, the lawyer had to go and twist the knife just a little bit deeper. “Not quite,” he said simply, his grin slowly fading as he got down to business. “As I’m sure you’re well aware, Canada is in the middle of a campaign for what may be the most important election yet. Furthermore, after the demise of David Sheppard and the uncertainty of the fate of his company, the American stock market is in a very precarious place. The last thing the world needs right now is a scandal revolving around the custody of two very important people’s children.”

John didn’t like the way this was going. Especially not with that slimy lawyer presenting it like the exciting little piece of news he thought it was. John was about to tell him to shove it, because he wasn’t about to give a shit about politics just because it somehow involved him now, but then Mr. Glouchester went and added the last bit of this little puzzle of his. “I think you will also agree that the amount of media involved in such a scandal would be detrimental to the children, especially in their grieving state.” He glanced down at the tiny pink thing still clinging to John’s shirt, almost as if she were an animal doing amusing tricks rather than a little girl that missed her parents.

John knew full well when he was backed into a corner. “What do you propose?” He asked carefully, not looking away from the man’s eyes in case they gave away some sort of flaw that John could use to win what felt like a battle against this guy. He understood that it wasn’t likely to happen, but he still had hope yet.

“It is the opinion of myself and both your personal lawyers that this be settled peacefully, without media or judicial involvement, right here and now, pending permanent and proper legal action when things are less…volatile.”

Of course. Because nothing in John’s life got to be easy. He turned from the slanted eyes of Mr. Glouchester and looked to McKay, who was now staring openly at his niece, sniffling herself into a fit in John’s lap, like she was an alien life form. Hell, he looked like he’d never seen a kid before in his life. John tensed himself up for a fight, because he wasn’t going to let this guy he’d met only a few days ago take his niece and nephew away from him, screw the media and whatever the hell this slimy lawyer thought they should do.

But…

“You take them,” McKay said blankly, like he wasn’t not really there, but then he shook himself a bit and refocused on John. “You take them. If you want. I—She seems to want you, anyway, and I have my career to think about—not that whatever you do isn’t important, but it couldn’t possibly be the same as Physics—but I don’t—You should take them.” McKay nodded then, as if finally deciding that what he was saying was what he actually believed.

“Are you sure?” John asked, because while a part of him was saying to take the offer and run, another part of him didn’t actually want to screw over his brother-in-law.

“Yes,” McKay said quickly, and then tilted his chin up and puffed out his chest a bit and said, in a voice far less convincing than what he’d probably wanted, “I am.”

“Wonderful,” Mr. Glouchester said with a wicked grin, clapping his hands together. He reached for one of three manila folders on his desk, pulled out a short stack of paperwork, and said “Then, without further ado, let’s just get the basic legal paperwork done and be on with it. This is all imbued with a temporary clause, of course, so signing these now will in no way negatively impact any future changes that will need to be made in order to find a more permanent settlement. But this will give you, Mr. Sheppard, basic legal guardianship and rights, for the moment.”

He kept droning on as John and McKay each picked up a shiny, new pen and signed the sheets handed to them on clipboards, John trying not to jostle Madison too much, because she wasn’t going to let go of him any time soon. When John finally got to the last dotted line on the last paper (and really, it seemed like quite a bit of paperwork for something that was non-binding and basic) McKay had finished his significantly shorter pile, and Mr. Glouchester reached over his desk and plucked the clipboards from them.

And then, just like that, they were being shooed from his office, like he really couldn’t spare them any more time despite his obvious enthrallment with their…situation. John hoisted Madison up on his hip, greeted Carmina warmly and, after she insisted, let her carry Theodore down to their rental car.

John was pretty sure none of this had hit, yet, because he’d just taken custody of two children and he wasn’t having a major panic attack, or even so much as breathing into a paper bag. God, maybe this is why McKay didn’t want the kids. Maybe he knew John was going to freak out and wind up hospitalized, and he wanted to spare himself the imminent decline of mental health until there was no other option but institutionalization.

Okay, so maybe McKay was getting the better end of the deal on this one. It didn’t mean John would change anything, did it?

No. No, there was no way. There was just…no way he was giving up this little girl or her brother, not when she was clinging to him like he was the last thing she had in the world. He kind of was.

And that thought alone was terrifying enough to send John into the very first wave of panic, which, in retrospect, would look like nothing more than a ripple before the storm.

What the hell had he just gotten himself into?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I'm writing this again. No, that doesn't mean it's coming off its tentative hiatus yet. It does mean that you get an update, though, after much much too long. So enjoy. :)

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Shakespeare's King Lear:
> 
> "Sir, I do love you more than words can wield the matter,  
> Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty,  
> Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare,  
> No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honor,  
> As much as child e'er loved or father found—  
> A love that makes breath poor and speech unable.  
> Beyond all manner of so much I love you."
> 
> (Boy, she was really laying it on thick, wasn't she? Either that or she's got a hardcore daddy-love complex.)


End file.
